You’re an author. You have a book. Face facts. You NEED a Web site. And if you already have a Web site, you need a great one. By great, I mean it not only has to look good but perform, or, in other words, be optimized to show up in search results. Here’s where many authors throw their keyboards. “But I’m a technophobe,” they cry. This excuse might have worked five years ago but it’s not going to work today. Having a Web site is just too important so here are three tips for you pixel-shy paperphilic scribes out there to make your site work for you.
1. Get Inbound Links
The most important ingredient of a healthy site is inbound links. The more sits that link to your site, the better your “PageRank” will be, a zero-to-ten score Google assigns your site based on how well it shows up in search results. A brand new page with no links will have a score of zero. A popular site, on the other hand, will have a high score. Google itself has a ranking of eight. And the higher the page rank of your inbound linked sites are, the higher yet your page rank will be. See, search engines reason that when a site links to yours you must have information that’s of some value to the linker. The more links you have, the more valuable your information is, according to the search engine, and thus, the better you appear in search results.
2. Optimize Your Site for Search Engines
Search engine optimization, SEO you might hear techies call it, is basically the process of outfitting your site so that it will show up as high as possible on search engines when someone types in a specific keyword search. For example, if your author name is Mordechai Anielewicz, you want your site to appear first on the search engine list when someone types in “Mordechai Anielewicz,” especially since Mordechai Anielewicz was also the name of a martyr of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
One of the most important ingredients of SEO is keywords. Keywords are words or phrases that will make your site appear when people type them into a search engine. For example, one of your keywords will be “Mordechai Anielewicz.” Keywords are embedded in your pages HTML code (the DNA of your site). Don’t worry, you don’t need to be HTML fluent. Your page layout program will let you easily add keywords.
Make sure you use keywords that accurately describe your site. And make sure you don’t use too many. Ten to fifteen is a good amount. There are tons of sites out there that abuse keywords. They’ll include highly searched keywords like “Britney Spears” and “yoga” in a site that sells Hamilton watches purely to get more traffic. They’ll also flood their site with hundreds of keywords for the same reason. The search engines are wise to the tricks and will actually penalize your site by ranking it lower if you try to pull a fast one.
Another biggie in SEO is content. Make sure that your text accurately reflects what your site is about. You’re an author so you should have a lot of words and phrases like “books,” “author signings,” and “publishing.” These are what people will search for and if these words appear in your text, your site will be much more search healthy. Here again be careful not to include too much text on your site (I’m talking about thousands of words a page). Shady sites flood their pages with text to up their chances of being picked up in a search. Once again, the search engines will punish.
3. Professional Design
Design is the third most important feature behind inbound links and search engine optimization. As the Internet grows older, site design is getting better. Today, even personal Web pages are designed better than professional pages several years ago. While you can get away with a mediocre-looking site, why would you settle for one?
Gone are the days when you had to have a computer science degree from MIT coupled with an artist’s eye to design a Web site. Now you can just buy them. For about fifty bucks you can grab a great-looking page from TemplateMonster. You can even find designs tailored for writers. You will need to have a few pieces of Web software, including a page layout program such as Microsoft FrontPage or Macromedia DreamWeaver and an FTP client to upload your pages.
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