Author Websites 101: Make It Visible With SEO

"If you build it, they will come."

Building a website and making it work for you is not the Field of Dreams. If you want to succeed with a website, people have to be able to find you. This is done in several ways, but most importantly through Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

To understand SEO, you first have to understand how people find things on the Internet. This should be a no-brainer to anyone who has surfed the web before. Search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN/Bing (the Big Three) are the single most important source of new visitors for your website. Other search engines include Ask.com, Lycos, Netscape and Earthlink, to name a few.

The next step is for a user to type some type of search term into the search box on one of these engines. For example, if I am looking for an author website, I simply type in the author's name. This is great if you are a well-known writer, but what about if you are not? The answer is that it gets a bit harder to find you.

Let's take another example. If I am looking for a great new horror novel, as a viewer, I'm likely to get more complex with my search term. Some choices I might make include:

Horror books about vampiresHorror novelsNew horror novelsHorror writersHorror novels January 2012

You can see very quickly how complex it can get trying to second guess your audience on how they might search for you. The first step in your process as a writer or author building a website is to sit down and come up with various terms people might type into that search box to find someone like you.

Now we come to the whole idea of "optimization." There are billions of website pages. You are one website in a billion. How exactly do search engines find every website that is relevant to the search terms used? The short answer is that they use spiders or robots that crawl through the millions of sites and gather information about the websites and store it in an index for later retrieval.

The next step is more complicated - returning results to the user looking for the information and returning the results in a ranked order. For this, the major search engines use highly secret algorithms that analyze multiple factors about a website. These algorithms are not publicized and marketing specialists can only speculate about what they include and how certain factors are weighted. The rest of this article will be devoted to the two factors we know rank heavily in the formula: keywords and links.

Going back to our example, our visitor is looking for a horror writer with a good book to read. We've listed several potential search terms the visitor might use to find what he or she wants. In order for search engines to find you, your website must have the same keywords as the user's search terms. In other words, your website should contain the words horror, writer, novelist, horror novel, etc.

However, optimizing your website is about gaining the most visitors - it's about gaining the most visitors that are a) likely to be interested in what you do, and b) likely to buy what you have to sell or read the information you have to offer. That means it's important not to try to cater to every single potential buyer in the world. You want to target your audience and decide who is your most likely buyer.

If you are a horror writer, it shouldn't be difficult to come up with a likely set of solid keywords to build your website around. If you are a multi-genre writer or offer an overwhelming number of copywriting, ghostwriting or editorial services, it might be more difficult to target your audience and find the right search terms to optimize your site.

The next question is where exactly do these key words need to be and how many do you need. There are several important areas to target: the url of your website, page titles, article titles/headings, and page contents. For a horror writer, johnsmith-horrorwriter.com might be an excellent choice in domain names. This url choice incorporates both the author's name and what he does. John should also have a sales or portfolio page entitled "Horror Novels" on his site. John could even share some of his short horror pieces on a blog page entitled "Horror Stories."

Are you starting to see how this works? Placing key words in key places tells search engines you are a serious horror writer and are likely to match the needs of the user looking for a good horror novel. The tricky part now is placing key words in the content. In the old days, copywriters simply loaded the content chock full of relevant key words in order to get better results. Search engines, however, quickly caught on to this tactic. Now we talk about 'keyword density' in the marketing business. This is the ratio of key words to total words in the content. If you 'stuff' your content full of key words, search engines will penalize you for it. Most experts now agree that 1 to 3 percent keyword density is optimal.

Finally, we come to the subject of links. There are two types of links to consider: outbound links and inbound links. While outbound links are considered the most important of the two, let's look at the latter first.

Web crawlers (spiders) follow all the links on your page (unless you tell them not to). If the link leads to another site with keywords relevant to your own, you score some points that rank you higher in search engine results. The key, however, is that your links are truly relevant. In the past, black hat marketers slapped random links on their sites that had little or nothing to do with what they were offering or who they were. Again, search engines caught on to this and the practice of link farming and started penalizing sites that did this, and even banned them altogether. You might want to consider linking to writers associations and professional groups to which you belong. For a copywriter, consider linking to well-trafficked sites like Grammar Girl, a favorite online dictionary or other tools you use yourself on the Internet.

Inbound links, experts agree, are even more important. The more sites out there pointing to your site, the higher your ranking. Experts feel this is a huge factor in website ranking algorithms. Just like with outbound links, relevancy matters. If you have a website selling horror books, it may not help much that your mom's blog about celebrity stars has a link to your site. The more relevant the website linking to yours, the better you will perform.

Getting backlinks is not always easy. You can do some of this yourself. Links from social media sites, guest posts on blogs, ezines and even other sites you own that are relevant all help. Your association profile pages should always link back to your website.

Another good practice is reciprocal linking. This means that you agree to link to another person's page if he or she provides a link to yours. As a horror writer, you could like with another horror writer and you both win. If you own a copywriting service, think about linking with a complementary service or someone who provides copywriting in areas different than yours.

While there is a lot more to learn and discuss about SEO, these are the absolute essentials you need to know before you start building the copy you need to fill out your website. If you start with a plan and list of solid keywords, you will find it easier to build a successful website that works for you.

Darcie Carsner Torres is a professional writer and editor with over 20 years of experience. She provides editing and critiquing services through CanAm Author Services, http://www.canamauthorservices.com/, and editing and ghostwriting services through Pen & Pestle, http://www.penandpestle.com/. Her mission is to help budding authors improve their writing and get published.

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Author Websites 101: Building the Website

Authors and writers are creative and adventurous by nature. When it comes to building a website, however, it's usually a love it or hate it experience. While there are numerous free programs and tools available for the inexperienced, they aren't always as easy as they seem. You may decide halfway through to throw in the towel and hire a professional. Whichever way you choose, here are a few tips that will help you get through the process.

DIY Website Building

It never hurts to try doing it yourself. If you want to have the best experience at trying this yourself, I suggest you use a free content management system such as Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal. Just to give you an idea of the power of these types of platforms, Wikipedia states:

"WordPress is used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet's 'top 1 million' websites and as of August 2011 powers 22% of all new websites. WordPress is currently the most popular CMS in use on the Internet."

All three of these programs are built around PHP and styled using CSS. CSS is really like a master control panel that styles all of your similar content elements uniformly throughout the site, such as colors, fonts and other elements. If you learn the basics of CSS, you can go far in customizing how your site looks and won't have to simply accept the way a website template comes out of the box, so to speak. You don't need to be able to create it; you just need to be able to know how to alter it.

You will also find that your CMS comes with access to a variety of different applications you can use on your site or in your sidebars. There are literally hundreds to choose from. You can plug in slideshows, analytical tools, RSS feeds, photo galleries, contact forms, social media buttons, events managers and shopping carts, just to name a few of the possibilities. It can be a bit overwhelming, to say the least.

Luckily, authors and writers are pretty low maintenance and don't need a lot of technically complex bells and whistles, which is why CMS makes sense. However, the most important thing for you to consider (or anyone for that matter) is the need to build an attractive website that works the way you and your audience need it to.

Designing your own website can be frustrating and a bit difficult if you lack the patience for such things. This can lead you to design a 'bad' website. Here you run the risk of alienating your readers or customers by appearing amateurish, sloppy or unprofessional. If people hesitate or stutter when you ask them what they think, it might be time to contact a professional.

Professional Web Design

Professional web designers come in a lot of different sizes. You can spend anywhere from a few hundred dollars to several thousand dollars to have a website designed to meet your needs and desires. The important thing is to have an idea what you want when speaking to a designer. Go out and research the websites of other writers and authors to get an idea of what they are doing. The basic elements you need to consider include:

Layout (are there sidebars and if so, where and how many?)ColorsUse of media such as photos, sliders, galleries, video and audioApplications used on the site

Be advised that not all designers will include (good) copywriting in the project scope. Make sure you are clear on who is expected to create it. If it is your designer, be sure he or she is aligned with or employs a reputable copywriter with knowledge of the peculiarities of web copy and marketing. If it is up to you, you should read through the series articles on copywriting and SEO for author websites, or hire a copywriter to work with your designer.

Make sure you are clear on all the charges up front. Make sure you understand what types of things will cost extra. Many designers will tack on a surcharge for changes made after a certain stage in the design. It's in your interest to know when that cut-off occurs. Additionally, get an idea of what payments are due and when. It is standard practice for designers to charge a non-refundable retainer. After that, designers differ. Some require the balance on completion and others require payments after certain stages have been completed.

You should also obtain an expected completion date. From both a designer side and a client side, I'm well aware of Murphy's Law: Whatever can go wrong will go wrong. The important thing is your designer's policy for delay. If delays are attributable to you, it may mean an extra charge or that payment comes due before the project is finished. Designers may even terminate the contract if client delays are substantial and still expect payment. While this may sound unfair, I've dealt with plenty of clients who prolong a one-month project into six or seven months, which often conflicts with other projects, so I know designers implement these procedures to protect their other clients and themselves.

Finally, the old adage applies: Get everything in writing. It is in everyone's interest to know what the project includes and doesn't, what procedure is available if the client isn't happy, the terms of billing and payments, and when things are due.

Darcie Carsner Torres is a professional writer and editor with over 20 years of experience. She provides editing and critiquing services through CanAm Author Services, http://www.canamauthorservices.com/, and editing and ghostwriting services through Pen & Pestle, http://www.penandpestle.com/. Her mission is to help budding authors improve their writing and get published.

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Author Websites 101: Domain Names and Hosting

Most authors I know don't have a lot of experience with building a website. If you don't have a website but are considering one, this article series is a good place to start. This article is devoted to explaining domain name selection and the web hosting process.

Every author needs a website for marketing purposes. Some authors choose to create a website for each book they write as well. If you choose your hosting company well, you can host unlimited domains and websites for just one monthly or yearly charge.

The first step is to choose your domain name. Fiction authors usually use their own name for their domain name, e.g., joeblow.com. However, if you have a very common name, such as John Smith, or were named after an already famous person, you may have some trouble. The place to start for choosing domain names is the WhoIs website. Here, you can enter a domain name to find out if it's already taken or not, and receive suggestions on alternate possibilities if your desired domain name is taken. You also have the option to backorder or ask to purchase the domain name from the current owner. There are companies out there that exist solely to buy up attractive domain names and sell them at a much higher cost to the public.

If you are an article author, copywriter or any other form of writer, domain name choices may be more difficult. Here, we want to stop and talk about SEO for a moment. One of the keys to good search engine optimization is to basically have your keyword in several key places - one of which is your domain name. If you are a novel author, your name (and perhaps that you are an author) is the key consideration. If, however, you provide other types of writing or writing services, things may get difficult. You may opt for your business name - people could look for you that way. But what about people who don't know you or your writing services exist?

One of the problems you may encounter is that you end up with domain names that are a mile long. While this doesn't matter from a SEO perspective, people don't like super long domain names to type into their search bar. Attractiveness of your domain name is a factor in domain selection as well. Some other key word considerations include your location, superlatives (e.g., the "best" articlewriter.com) and what kind of writing you do (e.g., businesswriter.com).

Once you have your domain name picked out, you are ready to purchase it and your hosting company. To make things easy on you, purchase your domain name through your hosting company. It may cost less on the surface, but many hosting companies give you one free domain name with a hosting package. However, it won't hurt anything if you want to secure the domain name through WhoIs before you are ready to host and build your site.

There are really two ways to go when it comes to web host companies: large and inclusive or small and specialized. I know many authors who prefer the specialized attention they get from local providers. Small companies are also less tempting for hacking attempts. However, local companies often don't have 24/7 service or the capacity of larger providers. What you need to look for in a hosting company includes:

Unlimited domain hostingUnlimited bandwidth usage and storage spaceUnlimited MySQL databases24/7 customer support

Those are the essentials; everything else is a perk or an option we will discuss in a separate article.

Costs are generally uniform throughout the industry. However, if you opt to have a professional design company create a custom website, beware of agreeing to host your site with them. I have run into a relatively large number of these companies that design the site, host the site for an exorbitant fee and/or monthly management charges, and then make transferring the site elsewhere extremely difficult. In fact, we have had to threaten some with legal action to get them to release the sites and/or provide the website files. These black hat companies tend to be less than helpful in giving you direction in how to make the transfer. They may also lock you into their hosting by using "proprietary" designs and management systems that aren't transferrable outside their company and which will cost you hundreds or thousands to reproduce.

While most designers and design companies are reputable, service-oriented entities, it may be in your interest to use separate hosting in order to protect yourself.

The next article in this series will address all of the add-on services available to you when purchasing your hosting package. I will discuss what they are, what they do and which authors or writers might need them.

Darcie Carsner Torres is a professional writer and editor with over 20 years of experience. She provides editing and critiquing services through CanAm Author Services, http://www.canamauthorservices.com/, and editing and ghostwriting services through Pen & Pestle, http://www.penandpestle.com/. Her mission is to help budding authors improve their writing and get published.

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