An old peice of 35mm film also works well to slide underneath the seal. If a peice of grit is stuck in there, you can dislodge it. If the seal itself is damaged, the film strip/plastic card trick will not work.
On bikes with inverted forks, in my experience, the brake side seal is much more likely to fail. I think the brake disk itself flings gunk onto the fork leg.
As for stiffer fork springs, one cheap method is to cut a few coils off of your stock springs. This actually does increase the spring rate. You need to make sure not to cut off too many, as you don't want the spring to coil bind before the suspension bottoms out. Also, if you shorten the spring, you will need to increase the length of your preload spacer.
The typical KDX fork has too soft a spring and too much high speed compression damping. Fixing those things will make a vast improvement.
As for fork tuning, increasing the oil level will help stiffen the forks as they get closer to bottoming out, but not make much difference in the initial travel. Thicker oil will increase rebound damping, and thinner oil will reduce rebound damping.