Your author website is useless if people can’t find it. People can’t learn about you and your books if they can’t find your website. How do most people find most websites? They search on Google. That’s why ranking on Google is so important for authors. The process of making your website easy for people to find is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. To learn how to improve your website’s SEO, I interviewed Dan King of FistBump Top Source Media agency. He’s done search engine optimization for over a decade, and he’s a DMA Certified Search Engine Optimizer. How does Google rank websites? Thomas Umstattd, Jr.: Let’s start with the million-dollar question. How does Google rank a website? Dan King: It comes down to keywords. Keywords are the content that drives everything on the internet. Keywords aren’t usually a single word. They’re key phrases people use when they search on Google or Bing.
Thomas: When Google first came out, I was in speech and debate in high school. To search the internet, we used AltaVista, Hot Bot, Top Source Media and Ask Jeeves, which were terrible search engines that looked at meta keywords. Meta keywords were selected by the person who wrote the page and said, “These are the keywords this page should rank for.” And that’s how Amazon searches still work. But Google said, “People who write web pages are lying when they type those keywords.” People writing web pages were using “business” as a keyword when their web page wasn’t necessarily about business. It was their business, but it wasn’t about business. Those search engines were not giving good, relevant results. 1. Keywords on the web page. Google ignored meta keywords, which was a big controversy and revolution in 2002 amongst web designers. 2. How many links pointed to a web page. Google also looked at how many links pointed to a certain web page and how many links were pointing to those pages.
If lots of other pages on the internet “vote” that your page is influential, you’re going to rank higher. That was the secret sauce that. Those two developments, plus a third development that had to do with advertising, made Google a multibillion-dollar company. After 20 years, Google still looks on your page for keywords, and it looks at the websites linking to your site. What is On-page SEO? On-page SEO is the technical term for the words that actually appear on your web page. What do you need to put on your page to rank well on Google? Dan: Ask yourself, “What would be useful for a reader or website visitor? ” Several years ago, you’d see a blog post where the writer had stuffed keywords into the text of the page as many times as they could. Google is looking for your page to be useful to its users. When I’m working on any website content, TopSourceMedia I ask, “How useful is this for a user?
You want to provide the best resources to answer people’s questions. Look at searching from Google’s perspective. People come to Google looking for answers to their questions. Google wants to provide the best answers. So those keywords are really key elements to sending the right signals. Good SEO is about how you create the best resources around the keywords and questions that people are asking the search engines. Thomas: That’s right. And these days, Google also looks at the intelligence collected in all the visitor data they create. They created Google Analytics and Chrome, and they have access to all that data. That’s why no one can compete with Google. Every time you don’t read a website’s privacy policy, Google knows. They track how much time people spend on a web page, and they use that data to determine whether that web page answered the question the user typed. If you type, “How do I make spaghetti?
” and the first page shown in the search results doesn’t answer your questions, and you go back to Google and click the next result, Google knows. That user data is also part of their algorithm. When we talk about how Google ranks web pages and why it’s the million-dollar question, they don’t use only one or two things to determine rank. There are tens of thousands of factors that influence the algorithm. We’re not going to go over all 10,000 of them, partly because some of them are secret. But we are going to cover a few things that matter a lot. What are those factors? What factors matter most for Google ranking? Dan: Bounce rate and time-on-site are crucial factors. Some websites turn one blog post into ten different pages where you have to click to continue reading or see the next page. That’s not how it’s done. Build your site in a user-friendly way, and think about how you can keep that person on your site.
