Building a better website

If you have made yourself a website, please pat yourself on the back and feel proud. The experience is challenging, but it is a wonderful way to boost your skills on the computer and get to understand the way modern businesses operate.

You need to know how to use your website and make it popular. Some people are happy to use a website to communicate with an audience, to inform, educate and entertain, but they will still want to know if they have an audience. However, most people with websites will have something they want to advertise and sell from their website.

Indie Scriptorium is mainly a self-help information website that shares the trials and tribulations of our members as we learn about the complex business of self-publishing. But it is linked to our individual web sites where we sell and advertise our novels and art.

The Indie Scriptorium website is built with WordPress, a popular web building site that can be started up for free. The WordPress program allows you to view who is using the site, where they come from in the world, how long they stay on the site and what are the most popular pages of the site. WordPress also allows people to follow the website. The goal of any website is to get more and more followers.

Analytics–the first step in building a better website is to learn how to access data about who is using your site, and then gain an understanding which part of your website attracts the most attention. What’s working and what isn’t.

WordPress has built in analytics, which provide quick reports on what traffic is coming to your site. It is a program called Jetpack Stats. For more complex analysis, you can also use Google Analytics, which provides a more complex analysis of how visitors to your site use the site.

As a newbie to my own WIX site, I’m still learning how to read the traffic reports. I’ve found it’s a matter of logging into the WIX login page and the site takes you to the Analytics page first. If you then click on the site sessions and post views graphs WIX takes you to another screen and gives you a breakdown of how many people visited, how many were unique and how long they stayed on the site. It also provides a lovely map of where your visitors live in the world. I also use the blog activity graph which provides information about how many people visited each blog so you can work out what is popular for future blog posts.

A good way of attracting visitors to your website is by posting regular interesting blogs that attract regular followers. It is recommended that when you blog you use key-words that attract the right attention. For example: Indie Scriptorium is aimed at people who want to self-publish their books. Our blog titles are therefore important and should contain key-words that attract people searching for self-publishing information. Blogs are most effective when posted regularly. They need to be researched, timely and well written.

There are many ways to build a better website. I have discovered a wonderful website ran by the Queensland Government, which provides excellent information for new businesses. Try browsing https://www.business.qld.gov.au/running-business/marketing-sales/marketing/websites-social-media/building-managing-website

I will do additional research as I try to master the whole new world of websites, marketing and getting your books into the world.

Please let us know if you find our articles helpful and provide any tips, ideas or suggestions to share with us at Indie Scriptorium.

Cheers Elsie

© Elsie King 2023

Feature Photo from Creative Commons

Search Engine Optimisation

When it comes to a search engine optimisation (SEO) you want a bullet train rather than a puffing billy train. The speed of someone finding your site is important apparently, and I wondered why?

Search Engine Optimisation is best described as a process for getting the right people, and more of them, to your website. This is very important if you want to sell something. For authors it may be a newly published novel, a book launch or a date for an author signing. For artists, it may be a painting for sale, news about an exhibition or sets of your original artworks printed as cards for sale.

Not all websites are about selling. Blogs can build your personal brand online, becoming an influencer, or just sharing your thoughts and ideas.

So, you may need to think about SEOs when you start up your website. My goal was to have a place where a person can look at my novels, have a link to buy one and find out about me as a person and writer. So yes, eventually I would like to bring people to my website to increase my sales of books and possibly art as well.

There are about thirty different big world-wide search engines and many more that offer specialized and local information searches, but the biggest is certainly Google.

I love Google. I’m constantly using it for many things, weird, wonderful, entertaining and useful. As a writer, I zip in and out of Google all the time. Lots of other people do too. It is the most visited website in the world and enjoys 92% of the SEO market. It’s rather magical really, how you put a few words in a box, press a button and Wham-O you get the information you need. But it does more than that. It can give you pages and pages of options to browse through until you find the best one, and that one site probably has the best SEO and comes up number one on page one. And that’s where you want your website to be when someone is looking for a book to buy.

It’s not magic that gets your website up the front, but it is a complex process involving crawling spiders, algorithms, keywords and black and white hatted hackers. Too much information for this little black duck, but do browse Wikipedia’s SEO explanation for all the details.

Having decided that my aim is to sell my books and art (publishing will happen later in this year) what I needed was some tips for making my website a good place to visit now. Good old Google comes up with a wonderful list of tips for getting your website noticed. (Optimize your site for search engines for beginners.) They provide some simple guidelines which I will briefly mention here.

Use accurate descriptive titles for your pages.
Use a different page for different products and clearly name them in your menu.
Mention everything that you sell or offer.
Update your content regularly so your readers know when to visit your site.
Keep your site up to date. Remove references to things that are in the past.
Use text as much as possible as Google understands text better than images.
Get referrals from other places. If you are in a writer’s group, ask that they have links to your site or share links with other authors you know.

WIX also has some good short tutorials about SEOs and marketing. I will address these ideas in my next blog.

If anyone reading this wants to share their own experience with building up visitors to your web sites, then please contact us at Indie Scriptorium. We would love to hear from you.

Cheers Elsie King

Photo supplied by Creative Commons

Indie Scriptorium — Self Publishing Collective (SPC)

Self-Publishing Collective

getting traffic

Building a better website

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