SEO | Indie Scriptorium — Self Publishing Collective

Part One – Understanding how search engines work

Having a website is a great idea for authors. It allows them to showcase their books and builds relationships with readers. You can sell your books on-line through links to your book publisher. You can write blogs or newsletters for distribution, provide information about your life and writing career, advertise future releases and connect to social media. You can advertise author events and book signings. It is a marketing tool with a personal focus and while it can be tricky to set up it gave me a lot of satisfaction having a website. But mine hasn’t performed and languishes unread. Time to make some changes.

But where do you begin? There are millions of author websites in existence, and they all are competing for attention and sales. So how do you get your website noticed? Let’s find out.

Let’s start with the biggie, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION – SEO

When I want to research a topic, I fire up Google and then work out what information I want. For example: I want to find out about SEOs. So, I type in “what is a SEO?”

(Some popular alternatives to Google are DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yahoo but there are over 1500 others to choose from including one called Dogpile?)

The response to my search is overwhelming. I initially got a very long and complicated one sentence explanation which didn’t make much sense. I then scrolled down to 76 (enough, there were more) companies giving explanations about SEOs. There were also several You-tube videos available with lovely people wanting me to find out visually what SEO’s are all about. They all invited me to click on their website and swallowed up in their advertising and sign up for expensive services to improve my website’s SEO.

I scrolled down to Wikipedia. I love Wikipedia and regularly donate when they put out requests. Yes, I know it’s not perfect but it’s a great first stop that can provide you with good information and directions for further research.

Wikipedia defines SEO as the “Process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or web page from search engines.”

Okay, what do I, as an Australian author need to improve my website’s SEO. Well, the Key Words are Australian and author. These narrow down my search to what is relevant to me. I Google again and get another long list of companies and individuals who want me to look at their websites and sign me up for their services.

I chose three web sites to explore:

Australian Writers Centre – it looked professional and offered a course on SEOs.
Jin and Co. Caught my eye with the proclamation “Two simple steps for authors to found in Google with SEO.
Amazon SEO for authors.

I chose the Australian Writers Centre because it looked professional. The tag “Two Simple steps…” caught my attention as it offered a quick and simple solution. I chose Amazon because they are a big brand and should know what they are talking about.

So, these services and companies drew me in with their presentation, that includes their titles, their choice of words to advertise themselves and their brand name. It is these factors that draw readers and potential customers. It is these factors that you must address to improve your own website.

The other big consideration is, Do I want to pay for a SEO improvement service or do it myself?

There are information websites for free. These are referred to as “organic” or “natural” traffic and is hard to find amidst the other monetarised websites. Many YouTube videos fall into this category, as does Wikipedia. I also found a Business.gov.au website and looked at Wix and LinkedIn sites for free information.

The second, and more prolific websites available are called direct traffic, which is really advertising. Advertising on-line includes emails (think Spam) Banner advertising where an advert decorates the bottom of a page. Pop – ups jump out at you at unexpected times, some webpages encourage you to join in a chat with a robot. The aim of these services is to get your money, which is fair enough if they provide a good service and you can afford them. All these websites are geared to draw you in and some of them make it difficult to escape from their greedy clutches. Ever found yourself in a website without a log out or delete button and you keep on going around and around looking for a X.

All these multiple forms of websites are guided by Algorithms.

Algorithms have been around since 2500BC in Babylonia. They are formulas that take complex date from a variety of sources and make it more user friendly.

In modern times algorithms are programmed by computers to work out what words and sentences are popular and gain the attention of browsers. They do this primarily through keywords, and getting the right key words, the name and the visual presentation of the site. It’s what draws attention to your website and, the books that you hope to sell.

Website marketing is a huge area to research and understand. I have found just this first step edifying. Watch out for more blogs on this complex topic.

References used in this Blog:

Wikipedia
LinkedIn SEO – 6 steps to optimise your profile.
Wix – Free SEO tutorials
Australian Government – Business.gov.au – Improve your search engine rankings.

Photo: Attributed to Stock photos

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

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