Promoting Your Writing Web Site
In “Web Site Design Tips for Writers” you learned some
guidelines about the basics of starting and finding a home for
your web site. No matter how brilliantly your site is designed,
getting visitors to it requires some tactics that are
specialized to the online world. To drive traffic to your site,
knowing the business of naming and optimizing it for the search
engines so that your web site is easy to locate is what will
allow your site to reach large numbers of online readers.
Keywords What will make people race to your site faster than the
speediest Internet connection? Keywords! These words and phrases
indicate what your site is about and contain more authority than
a novice can imagine. Suitable keywords will feature terms and
words used in the text on your home page. Each subsequent page
you create should have its own set of keywords. Overture.com has
a feature where it will show you just how popular the keywords
that you’ve chosen really are. This is updated on a monthly
basis, but you can also find the week’s most popular keywords.
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion Also,
investigate http://www.nichebot.com
What is your site all about? What words best describe your
writing, preferred genre, hobbies, etc.? What words would a
person use to find your web site? For example, if you are
building a web site to show you have screenplays for sale, the
term “screenplay” using the overture site listed above, you’ll
see that this term was searched 12,000+ times, followed by
“screenplay writing” 3,100+ times. On a highly ranked site these
terms will be used along with others containing variations such
as: screenwriter, scriptwriter, scripts, TV/Film screenwriter,
etc. Thinking like a potential viewer Hollywood insider,
producer, potential writing partner, etc., is the key to
keywords.
Meta Tags Description When you accurately describe what is on
each of your web pages in the meta tags description area on each
page of your site, this one or two sentence description will
help anyone who discovers it in a search engine. You are doing
your viewer a favor and they will return it by stopping by for a
visit. For that screenplay site, here is what you might add for
the home page: “screenplays in action, drama, romance and horror
genres for sale.” Using descriptive keywords is what works. This
comes to only 10 words, or 64 characters including spaces. Some
search engines accept up to 250 characters, others will allow
far less. Keeping it within 100 characters or about 15-20 words
is recommended.
Web Page Titles As a writer, you’re used to titles. But they
aren’t just for books, articles, movies and royalty. When
designing your site you’ll be able to name each page so that
online visitors will locate your home page or other pages you’ve
created. What you call your web site is as important as what you
name your literary masterpiece[s]. Be as descriptive as
possible. You probably want your writing site to have the term
“writing” or “writer” or “author” in the title. But you also
want to be more specific - such as “screen writer,” “technical
writer,” “novel writer,” “novelist,” and so on.
The marked lack of understanding page titles has repeatedly
shown up as I’ve seen web sites with “New Page” or “Page 2″
appear along the top of my browser. The web designer didn’t
fathom the benefits he or she had in naming pages. Naming your
pages will get you more online traffic.
Alt Tags These little tidbits of information that are hidden
from view are other ways to boost your search engine rankings.
In the book ‘Search Engine Optimization for Dummies’ by Peter
Kent, he writes: “You use the tag to insert images into
Web pages. This tag can include the ALT= attribute, which means
alternative text.” You can see them on many sites when you hold
your cursor over an image. Mr. Kent explains that originally
these tags were used back in the good old days of dialup-only
access and connections being so poky that by adding text to the
image it adequately described what the viewer was unable to see.
Also, these tags are spoken to the visually impaired, so
inserting them is a mark of kindness. But, to be frank, the best
reason to add those alt tags is to have the search engines read
them and decide your site should be ranked even higher than if
no alt tags were included in the image[s]. Don’t add too many of
them, just enough to be able to describe that photo of you as:
“award winning novelist [your name] has new book on bestseller
list” or something of that nature.
Links It’s not about having a virtual link farm on your web
site; it’s about attracting relevant links. If you want to keep
your site within the mainstream and family-friendly sites, be
careful of where you are linking. Many search engines and
directories won’t accept sites with adult themes, gambling
sites, or anything advocating illegal activities, etc. So, try
to keep it clean.
Oftentimes you’ll read about a site having a Google PR
[PageRank] of a number from 0-10, with 10 being considered the
best. When one has reached a page rank status of 3 or 4, the
links manager or site owner, might not welcome newcomers. This
would mean your site, as that’s what someone with a brand new
web site is - a 0 page rank. But all sites begin that way and
here you’re learning what Google looks for when it ranks pages
so your PR can start moving up. PR is determined by many factors
including links coming from ‘other’ sites to yours, longevity of
site, quality of information and keywords found within the site,
and the number of pages your site contains. In other words,
Google’s search engine [or any major or minor search engine or
directory] will spot a 100-page site sooner than it will a
single web page.
Many web masters create a links page and add anything that comes
along. That’s not the best idea and Google doesn’t list more
than 100 links per page anyway. Others will separate their links
page into subjects so that a gardening web site is grouped in an
appropriate category, as would a financial site being with
others within the same category.
A better way to add links is to have them on appropriate pages
that can be reached from your main page. For example, if you’re
designing a writing site that caters to children’s books and
have a page devoted to children’s artwork, add links to that
page for such related items as: classic children’s stories, art
education, art for kids, children’s clothing, baby products, and
other topics that are both closely and somewhat-closely related.
This would be helpful for both you and the other company’s site
you are linking with. It will also ensure that your children’s
artwork page will get more visitors than if there were no links
listed there.
While it’s advantageous to have others linking to you, this is
more difficult to do when you’re an unestablished online
presence. But that is why the following three sections should be
of assistance.
Announce Your Web Site Analyze your site at
http://www.sitereportcard.com Keep statistics on a weekly or
monthly basis to monitor your site’s progress.
1. Press Release - Writing a press release is a great way to
increase your web site traffic and generate more awareness of
your site. Make sure your press release conveys what your site
is about and look at the writing tips section at each press
release site as to glean information on how to write effective
press releases. Your press release will be seen by more people,
get your site put into the search engines faster, and you can
follow the statistics and upload photos if you pay for the
service.
http://express-press-release.com
http://www.free-press-release.com
2. Write Articles - Getting your web site noticed by writing
articles is another effective method for announcing your web
site’s arrival. Not only do your articles establish online
credibility, you should be able to get your words out there more
easily than those with no understanding of what constitutes
effective online words. Another huge advantage to writing
articles is that links are pointed back to your site from
larger, more highly ranked sites.
http://www.articlesbeyondbetter.com
http://www.businesshighlight.org
http://www.homebiz-direct.com/articleWriting.html
http://morganarticlearchive.com
http://www.submityournewarticle.com
3. Submit to Search Engines & Directories - This is a way to
allow more than your immediate family and friends see your site.
When providing information about your site to these directories,
you will oftentimes have to include a reciprocal link on your
site. There are paid search engines and directories that will
get your web site indexed within a matter of days, but many of
them will also do the same service, only taking weeks or month,
for no charge. Here is a comprehensive one that will get you
started: http://www.isedb.com/html/Web_Directories
Web Rings Signing up with web rings can bring you more traffic.
There are more than 2000 writers web sites alone on webring.com,
so this is an excellent place to begin. Adding your site to a
web ring requires basic knowledge and an administrator will
first approve your site, a process that can take a few hours or
longer, depending upon the size of the community.
http://dir.webring.com/rw
Once you have designed and optimized your site for your online
audience, revel in the fact that you have accomplished this task
and always be prepared to update and expand your web site. After
all, you never know who might show up…