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

©Elsie King 2023

Photo supplied by Creative Commons