Is your site friendly and inviting to your readers?

The more sophisticated the world wide web becomes, the more the rules change when it comes to how you’re going to attract potential readers to your website… the broad spectrum of “stuff” we call search engine optimization or SEO.

For example, in the recent past you might have heard everything was about keywords, keywords and more keywords. And keywords are still important. But as search engines become smarter, it’s becoming much more important to give your readers an enjoyable and useful user experience.

Nevertheless, there are things you can do to make your site fun for your readers and still improve your searchability.

Blog Away

As an author, your concern needs to be supplying fresh and interesting content on your author website that reflects your writing personality. Obviously that means blogging! Blogging lets you write, offer up samples of your work, improve your website ranking and traffic, and of course get readers to sign up for your email list.

Next Sunday’s post will delve deeper into what to blog and how often, but in the meantime here are what a few VERY popular blogging authors are talking about:

• Joanna Penn – The Creative Penn – Lots of great advice for the self-published author; Joanna has a strong international following
• David Gaughran – Let’s Get Digital – A following of over 67,000 subscribers, David is an outspoken indie author advocate.
• C. Hope Clark’s Funds for Writers – Over 35,000 subscribers follow along with this prolific author who gives authors lots of intel on paying writers markets.
• Chuck Wendig’s Terrible Mind Blog – Nearly 6,000 subscribers; interesting content. Fair warning: not for users looking for a PC read 🙂

Label Your Photos!

Another overlooked area of improving your SEO is labeling photos. Make sure those “DSC00123.jpg” or IMG0123.jpg” images are re-named when you load them up to your website; generic labels don’t do anything for your searchability.

For examples, search a topic on Google and go to the “Images” option. You’ll see how many images come up for that search term and veer readers to websites. Are your images helping direct readers to your site?

Make Sure You’re Mobile Friendly

As we discussed in last week’s post about critical elements of your author website, having a responsive (mobile-friendly) site isn’t just a kindness to readers on phones and tablets, it factors into your Google search ranking.

For additional useful SEO tips, view/save the great infographic below, and click on our additional resource tools, including free PDFs from both Hubspot and Google that offer excellent knowledge of what’s really needed in today’s SEO so your own site can shine!

Additional Resources

• 7 Ways to Nail Your Author SEO in 2016 (Excellent article by Miral Sittar of Bibliocrunch)
• From Hubspot: 17 SEO Myths You Should Leave Behind in 2016 (Free Download or View)
• Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (Free Download or View)