Great web site -- does anyone visit it?

When you first publish as an author one of the very first things you'll hear is - do you have a web site? You have to have a web site. Chances are you have one before you make the first sale and you include a link in your email signature, in all your blog posts, etc. That's great. Maybe you spent a lot to get a site with kick-ass graphics and design. Maybe you're lucky and you can do a little HTML so you do your own. You update it, run a contest here and there.

But here's my question. Does anyone actually visit it? Besides those people on the loops you told about your contest? Can Susie reader easily find your web site while she's looking for good books when she's never heard of you before?

Okay, here's a little test. Go to Alexa.com (http://www.alexa.com) and click Traffic Rankings. In the left column, type in your site's address in the Lookup Website: field. Click go and in a couple of seconds, your traffic rank should appear on the right. What did you get? Keep in mind, the lower the number the better. If you got, for example, the rank of 2,000,000 that means your site is the 2 millionth most viewed web site on the net.

Now, stick that lower lip back in. That's actually not a bad rank considering that there are many many millions of web sites on the net. That's not bad at all. If you're not in the top 5 million or 10 million or you get "NO DATA," that's when you know you have a great web site but people aren't seeing it.

How could that be? You have a lovely site? You hold contests and announce them? Why should you worry about the ranking thing anyway?

The rankings come from data used gathered, and compiled by the search engines like Google, etc. Think about it, if someone has never heard of you before and they are on Google trying to look up good romance books to read, how will they find YOU? That's why ranking is important. The better your rank, the more people are finding you and you have it in your power to improve the odds that they will...

6 Things That Will Boost Traffic And Improve Your Traffic Ranking

1) Reliable, professional hosting. Painful truth #1 Search engines often will NOT index a site hosted on a free service. Why? Often spammers and scammers will try to peddle their wares on these free servers because they can get as many as they want with no cost and get rid of them just as easily if they are reported.

Get a good professional hosting service instead. Yes, there's a cost involved. But you can get a good account with little or no down time for your site and loads of features that you might find helpful. You probably need only a basic account that might cost no more than $5 per month. GoDaddy.com provides good hosting, so does HostGator.com, and Psyche Designs (http://psychedesigns.com -- shameless self promo! LOL)

Also, remember this. You can't really complain if your site goes down for a couple of days on a free service. You can on a paid account. AND no ads!

2) Site content and layout. If you have a site that for whatever reason takes forever to load or doesn't have a lot of information on it, what's the viewer's motivation to look around or even stay? The internet has given us all a mild case of ADD. Most of us don't want to wait for a site to load. If we have to wait longer than, on average, 3 seconds, we'll leave and look for something else. Your site should load fast, be easy to read and easy to navigate. The font should be a good size and easy on the eye. Simple fonts and colors work best. Scrolly fonts are hard to read and if you put bright yellow text on a sky blue background, you're going to give your visitor a splitting headache. LOL

Also, make sure you've got something of interest right on the main page. Yes, that introduction letter that you lovingly wrote for the front door page is nice, but chances are the person reached your site by looking for books. They don't want to read that nice intro letter and might leave thinking they stumbled onto a site that doesn't have good books. Sure you've got good books. Put them on the front page!

Make sure your links work. One more thing - take it easy on java script and flash. Some people are on older computers - believe it or not - and can't easily view flash. Aside from that when the search engine bots come to index your site, sometimes the java and flash, if enough is used, block the bots from indexing your site - not a good thing. So go lightly please.

3) Watch your statistics. Aka known as don't just look at your stats program to see how many hits you've gotten. That's not enough. Take a closer look. Most statistics programs used now have very detailed information about your visitors and that's the key to everything.

NOTE: If you don't have a good statistics program with your hosting account, you can use Google Analytics free and it's a powerful tool. See http://www.google.com for more information.

A good stats program should be able to tell you what pages your visitors are looking at and how often. Pay attention and try to discern why they like one page over another. Can you make the less popular pages more like the popular ones? You might also have search string information. What's that? That tells you what someone typed into a search engine to get your site in their search results. Like "romance books, romance novels, etc.," Make a note of that for #4

4) Learn what meta tags are and how to use them. Those meta tags are not just sitting up there at the top of your web code taking up space. They are very powerful tools to those who know how to use them. Using meta tags, you can control the title of your site in search engine results - like google, you can control what the description says, and you can use keywords to make your site more popular and increase your traffic through keywords. This is a loaded topic for another day. Maybe next month's blog?

5) Links, links, links. Painful truth #2 - The more links you have to your site, the more the search engines perceive your site to be popular. And by links I mean links TO your site. You can put links to 200 sites on your site, but that will only make those 200 sites more popular - not yours. You need links TO your site on other sites and the more, the better.

How do you get those? Exchange links with other writers, readers, or related sites. Join popular web rings. Make sure your publisher(s) link to author sites and if not, ask if this could happen. Be creative, there are many ways to boost links to your site over time.

Keep in mind if you exchange links with your BFF's today that your rank won't increase overnight. But it will over time. It just depends when the search engines next index your site. It could be in a couple of days, it could take a couple of weeks. And the search engines don't all show up to index your site at the same time.

Do all those blog and forum posts you've made help? On some search engines, like Yahoo, yes, all those posts you've made with your site address in the signature line might do you good. Google, however, pays them no attention.

6) Submit your site to search engines. Especially if you got a "NO DATA" rank. Submitting your site to the search engines will put your site in the search engine's queue to be indexed. The bots from the search engines will visit your site, store the information.

Is one time enough? No. You should regularly submit your site to as many major search engines as you can. There are some free services out there that let you do that and there are some for pay. Keep in mind that using a free search engine submission service that only submits your site to 8 engines is better than nothing. This shouldn't have to cost a lot of money and will result in a noticeable improvement in your site's rank.


There you have it. Maybe your first basic crash course in SEO aka search engine optimization. Take a look at your site, see what you can do better and do your homework on meta tags. If you have questions, let me know. Thanks for having me!

Tina

Tina Pavlik
The Romance Studio ~ the romance genre today
http://theromancestudio.com
Open now! Psyche Designs ~ http://psychedesigns.com