Anna Staniszewski

Hey everyone, this is Anna’s husband, Ray, and I’m doing a guest post on how to get better search engine results for your author website. These tips will help you set up your website so that it will get better search results.

1. Think like your visitors

The first thing you have to do when you are optimizing your website for search engines is to put yourself in the shoes of a potential visitor. Think about who your visitor is. If you’re a published author, you’re going to want people to visit who will potentially buy your book. If you write children’s books like Anna, that could mean the actual reader, or a parent/aunt/uncle etc who would be buying the book for the reader.

Google Search Results

Try to think of what the visitor would type into a search engine (besides the name of the book or author) in order to find your book. Notice the title of this post. I could have chosen something like “Search engine optimization”, but “Get better search results for my author site” is something that an author might type into Google to find this article. If you’re writing a(nother) book about vampires, one search term might be “books like Twilight”, or “book for my twelve year old daughter who likes vampires.” Try to come up with a bunch of search phrases for your author site. For example you could have a description of your book which uses keywords like “vampire”, “young adult romance”, or “sparkly vampire.”

2. Think like a computer

The next thing you have to do is look at your website like a search engine would. Most search engines use programs called crawlers, which look at the code which makes up your website. The crawlers read all of the text they see and count words to see what your site is all about. Crawlers can’t read images, however, so if you have any text in an image, the crawler won’t be able to see the image. A good trick to see your website how a web crawler would see it is to turn images off in your web browser and load up your website. A crawler should be able to see anything that’s left on the screen.

3. Putting it all together

There are way too many tricks to optimize your author site for search engines to go over in this article, but I’ll go over the ones that’ll get you the most bang for your buck.

• Web page title
  When a crawler visits your site, one of the first and most important things it sees is the title of your webpage. You can see the title if you look at the top bar in your browser window. The one for this page should say “Get better search results for your author site.” This text comes from the <title> tag in the html code for your website. You should try to fit the important keywords or phrases into the title, but you don’t want to overdo it. Above everything else, you want to make it readable for visitors, and not just a bunch of keywords strung together.

• Content
  Search engine crawlers love to visit new web pages, and they really love new content. So one way to keep crawlers coming back to your site is to have content that is updated frequently. Blogs are a great way to do this, but only if you update the blog frequently.

• Link text
  When you make a link, try to describe where the link is going in the text of the link. For example instead of this: To see a hamster with an enormous carrot, click here!
  You should write this: Look! A hamster with an enormous carrot!

• Other html tricks
  This might only apply to those who make their own websites, so you might need to know a little HTML to understand this, but there are some tricks you can use to feature important keywords on your site. <h1> and <h2> tags will tell the crawler that whatever is in the tag is important, so if you put keywords into these tags, they’ll carry more weight than if they were in a <p> tag. All <img> tags should have an alt attribute, so that a crawler can know what the image is. Ex <img src=”/images/awesomesaurus.jpg” alt=”picture of an awesomesaurus” />

4. Don’t overdo it!

This is pretty important. Search engines like to see keywords which pertain to whatever the website is about, but if they see too many, they’ll call shenanigans, and in some cases they can ban your website. This is called keyword stuffing, and it’s no good. How many keywords should you use on your page? No one knows. That’s because search engines are constantly changing the way they index websites. Just go with what sounds natural when you read the content.

These tips should help you get indexed by the search engines and get placed in the search results for a particular keyword. Keep in mind, search engines can be slow to index websites, so even if you make these changes, you might not see any difference for a few months. I’ll be back in a week or two to give you some more tips on how to get placed higher on the search results screen.