SEO for Dummies Like Me

In the past, anytime I saw the letters "SEO", I would fall aslee....zzzzzz. I didn't understand it, had no clue what it was; just that it was some kind of tech bro gobbledygook that was boring as hell. Even when I learned that it equated to discoverability, I shrugged. Didn't know how to do it even if I wanted to, so like most things I don't understand (like math), I ignored it.

Then I found out there actually were a few super-simple things I could do to enhance my author site's online presence. 

Now, my site is hosted by Blogger (free!), so these tips about SEO placement will show Blogger screenshots; however, every website has a place to add meta tags and descriptions ~ you just need to find where that place is. 

The easiest item to add is a blog's/website's description. If you want search engines to show what your site is really about, you should add one. Otherwise, the default is the name of your site. Well, "The Failed Author" might sound somewhat interesting, but also misleading. Maybe it's just a blog about an author's failures. (well...) This blog does more than that, though. Just like with this post, it offers tips, recommendations, and "bewares". So, for my full description, I wrote:

Tips for self-published authors on book promotion sites, author websites, do-it-yourself, author scams, marketing your book, what works and what doesn’t work from an author who has tried it all.

On Blogger under the Settings tab, there is a "Description" heading. It allows for entering up to 500 words, but that seems a bit much to me. My primary focus was to capture keywords that people use in their searches, and Google has a great free tool for that, Google Keyword Planner. Plug in your site's address and it will scan your site for the most common terms used within it and show the number of people who search for those keywords. Therefore, I made sure to include the keywords "author websites", "book marketing", "book promotion".

If your author website is only your name or pen name, as in my case, and you haven't input a description, people will need to search for you specifically, which is great if you have fans already. But if you do have fans, they know your website address because you've certainly included it in the back matter of your book, or they subscribe to your newsletter.

I have no fans. So, I really, really need a description of my site that includes popular keywords. As it turns out according to Keyword Planner I don't scatter very many popular keywords within apriltompkins.net. But I do use a few. Apparently, "Kindle Unlimited", "Kindle", and "free book" or "free ebook" are quite popular (who knew?), so my description is:

Novelist April Tompkins, writer of contemporary fiction and women’s fiction, offers a selection of Amazon Kindle Unlimited books and a free ebook for joining her newsletter. April’s novels are also available on Kindle and in paperback. 

IMPORTANT NOTE: This description will appear as a subheading on your site, which you probably don't want. To fix this, go to Layout, find the Page Header gadget, click on Edit, then delete that text. (Don't forget to save your changes.)

 

Search description

The way a search description differs from a description is that a search description is, according to Google:

"...a brief summary of a webpage's content that appears in search engine results. It's like a short advertisement designed to entice users to click on a specific result." 

For The Failed Author, the search description is extremely helpful, because my post titles are rarely very specific. A title like, "Now I Have to Use Pinterest, Too?" sounds like random bitching from a crazy person. Use it for what? Who's forcing you to use it? Why are you so upset? I could have named the post something clearer, but where's the fun in that? I've got a lot of vague titles like that. So, to me, what my site's search description is is a little traveling companion that tags along with all my posts. Here's an example of a random search description (or meta description) in Google's search results:

 

Note all the keywords displayed beneath the relevant paragraph. That tells me I can go to this site for ChatGPT courses, I can buy a subscription, etc. (This isn't an endorsement of any site; I just searched for "learn SEO".)

The search description is also known as meta tags. Your web host may use either term. In Blogger's settings, it's found under Meta tags. Meta tags are naturally shorter than 500 words ~ 150 is the limit. In fact, you want this to be concise so it displays fully in Google.

Mine for this blog might be a bit too long, and no, I didn't use keywords. I figure that's covered in my long description, although it's subject to change. Here it is:

do's and don'ts from a self-published author who has tried it all.

 

I did throw in a few keywords for my author site's tags:

 

Novelist April Tompkins writes contemporary and women’s fiction. Her books are available on Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, and in paperback. 

 

A final note for today: sign up for Google Console. Add your site so you can monitor its performance. If, like me, you have an author site with multiple pages, add each page of your site for measurement. It can be an eye-opener. I use it in conjunction with Google Analytics. Each measures different data. The analytics piece shows user behavior ~ which pages (or posts of a blog) are most visited, where your visitors originate, both geographically and organically (from Facebook? Instagram? Direct search?) The console measures how well your site performs in a Google search.

 

SEO gets far more involved; trust me, I've been trying to understand it all. Soon I'll talk about custom permalinks and other little tweaks one can make that aren't difficult at all. If I can do it, even a guppy can.