For many (if not most) people, Google is the Genius Zone gateway to the internet. Well, truth be told, it’s possibly a tie between Facebook and Google. But simply put, if your author blog isn’t optimized to get as much traffic from Google as possible, you’re leaving huge amounts of potential unfulfilled. Whether your site is for profit or not, not working to maximize your audience is doing you, your site, and your (potential) visitors a disservice. But first of all, let’s consider.
What is the Purpose of Your Author Blog?
Goals of your author blog may include:
To support sales of your books by communicating with current readers and helping to attract new ones.
If you’re a non-fiction author and have built up a website marketing funnel to profit from your readers (offering courses, consulting, services… ), then your site is essential for turning a book reader into a customer. Plus, it can attract new customers that haven’t even seen your books!
Or you may want to have a site to talk about the process of writing and publishing, whether anyone is reading your site or not! Perhaps to get your ideas out of your head or as a great way to network and communicate with other authors. You may even wish to use your site to build an audience of writers. If you’ve had success with self-publishing, you can use your site to offer them advice, consulting, and services.
But either way, the bigger your audience, the more your site benefits you and your business.
How to Get Traffic From Google Without Paying
Now, Google, of course, wants you to pay for advertising. Google makes their search engine as useful and accurate as possible, but it’s all just a wrapper for the ads they make money from – the ads running across the top and side of the search results. So Google somewhat reluctantly delivers those organic results (as they’re called). Therefore it’s essential to keep in mind that Google is under no obligation to list your site well, if at all.
Remember, they want you to buy ads!
Every time your site appears in the number one spot or even on the front page, it’s less likely you’ll buy ads. But, Google has to balance that with keeping the organic search results as helpful as possible. And it’s also worth keeping in mind that Google results are what’s known as a zero-sum game. There are always results for whatever’s being searched for. So if you’re number one for a while, but at some point, Google decides you’re no longer the best fit and banishes you to number 20, the Google results continue quite happily without you, even if your site getting banished to the second or third page devastates your business. Many businesses have been destroyed like this, and it’s largely due to business owners depending far too much on Google for getting visitors and customers rather than diversifying traffic and customer sources.
/how-to-start-a-blog-for-free-4687144-1-ab38a1b4fb5d4ed3bb58026b5dd49d54.jpg)
What Google Really Wants
At the simplest level, Google wants to make the experience of using search as positive as possible for as many people as possible. So what it’s always working on is delivering the best results, whatever people happen to search for. So that’s a question you must ask yourself – is your site the best result? Is that article you’ve just published really the best possible result for someone searching? Think about that when you’re not getting as much Google traffic as you would like, and your competition is getting listed higher than you. Google wants to deliver quality and relevant results. Is your page, or your site, higher quality and more relevant for that search than all other sites?
So what we’re talking about in this article is SEO – Search Engine Optimization. SEO includes actions you can take that encourage Google to send you many website visitors without paying for advertising. And the simplest way to do that is to provide so much value that by giving you the number one spot, Google is providing accuracy, relevancy, and value to the people searching So as well as recommending (again and again) that you publish amazing content, this article is a very crash course into some things you can apply to your site to help it get a lot more traffic through Google for the long term.
How to Optimize Blog Posts & Site Pages for Search
To optimize each page or blog post you publish on your site to get as much search traffic as possible, here are a few things to keep in mind: First of all, be mindful of keywords. If you’re not familiar with exactly what they are, keywords are what people search for online. But don’t keep them in mind too much.
For example, cheap car insurance.
If you research what people are searching for in your market, it can give you ideas for blog posts and other content. And naturally (not overdoing it), including those keywords in your content may give your site a nudge up the results.
Some keyword research tools to help you understand your market in-depth include:
The Google keyword research tool – you’ll need an AdWords account for this but don’t need to keep campaigns running actively.
Wordtracker – offering in-depth keyword research and analysis since 1998.
Bing Keyword Research – the keyword research tool from Microsoft’s Bing search engine (yes, Google rules the roost but don’t forget about Bing!)
Now, a single blog post could be relevant for many, many different keywords people could search for, from the comprehensive (“car insurance” for example) to niche terms, which are also known as long-tail terms (“car insurance for a yellow car with one working brake light,” as a silly example).
Including the main keyword you’re targeting in the title, and headline of the page can help, but always keep its use relevant to the content. If it damages the readability of your content, it is probably best to leave it out. You can also make sure you use Heading 1, Heading 2, and Heading 3 tags in your content. WordPress allows you to apply this easily when creating a page or post. If you’re not familiar with exactly what these are, there’s a lot more to keep in mind when optimizing pages and posts on your site, but the easiest and most efficient way to stay optimized isto use tools that analyze you and then make suggestions.
Here are a few you can start using right now:
Yoast SEO Plugin – Makes optimizing your WordPress site for the search engines quicker and easier.
Moz On-Page Grader – An instant audit of your posts and pages, letting you know what you’re doing well and what needs improvement.
SEMrush Site Audit Tool – Automatically helps you find issues hurting your traffic generation. But a recurring theme I’ll cover here, and really what determines the success or not of your site as regards SEO, is making your content and your site so valuable that people want to link to and socially share your site. Plus, great content means people want to spend a lot of time on your site, which is another thing Google considers. All these “signals” your site gives out (links, shares, time on site… etc.) help Google determine how valuable your site is, which then pushes up the results.
Optimizing Your Entire Site for Search Traffic
At the simplest level, the better the user’s experience on your site, the more Google rewards you. There’s an awful lot of factors Google takes into consideration, and here’s a few site-side issues to keep in mind and fix to the best of your ability:
Broken Links
For user experience, for your own benefit, and the search engines, you really want to ensure there are no broken links on your site, whether when linking from one page to another or external sites. Thankfully you don’t need to check this by hand! Some tools can help you automatically check for broken links, including:
Xenu Link Sleuth – Windows-based software that quickly checks every link on your site and gives you a report.
Broken Link Checker – This is one of many WordPress plugins that help you find and fix broken links.
Link Checker from W3C – This free tool comes from the consortium that works to create web standards that the rest of us use every day!
Site Speed
What’s also becoming more and more important for your visitors and Google is the speed of your site. If your site is slow and takes a long time to load, not only does it annoy your visitors, making them less likely actually to spend time on your site, but also Google measures this and considers this when calculating where to place your site in the results. It’s beyond the scope of this article to talk you through how to speed up your site since that subject can get very technical very quickly.
Which Pages Should, and Should Not, Be Indexed?
You also want to make sure you keep certain information out of the search engines. Again, this can get quite technical, so you may need to get help with this. And tools like Yoast SEO (linked above) can make it easier. For example, let’s say you have lots of pages with very similar text. This may then be considered “duplicate or low-quality content” by Google, and that’s one thing Google really doesn’t like. So making sure such duplicate pages don’t end up indexed by Google can be important to the well-being of your site. Effective use of noindex and robots.txt can be beneficial with this.
Does Your Site Work Well on All Screens?
You especially want to make sure your site is fully responsive. Responsive means that your site looks good regardless of ther screen size the person is viewing your site on, whether it’s a laptop, desktop, tablet, or mobile. Many WordPress themes are fully responsive, so this problem may be solved for you already if you’re using WordPress. But if you’re not using WordPress, or aren’t sure at all about this process, again, you may need to hire some help to help you resolve this. A quick way to check whether your site is responsive is to re-size your browser window and see what happens.
