A Beginner’s Guide to SEO – part two
Welcome to part 2 of our Beginner’s Guide to SEO!
Self-published authors have a lot to consider, in fact, writing the books is usually the easy part! That is true for me, at least.
When it comes to marketing and making covers, well, I’m learning, I can say that.
Here I have gathered a few more tips on how to maximise SEO on your author website to get what amounts to some free publicity. And as we know, there’s no such thing as bad publicity!
How to optimise SEO on your website
This is crucial for anyone looking to improve their google page rankings, particularly for those of us who are more creative and less techie.
Let’s look at the first 3 – and possibly most crucial – SEO tips you can use to improve your author site today.
Keyword research
Keywords are an essential component of SEO. The keyword should be the main topic of your post. For instance, if you write clean romance stories, and you want readers of clean romance to find you, then any and all keywords related to clean romance are appropriate to write about in a blog post on your author website. Some keywords here to think about might be: sweet romance, wholesome romance, or even sensitive romance.
A keyword is a term that people would search for. This is why you should make certain your keyword is relevant to the target audience’s search intent. It may be a short phrase like ‘digital marketing’ or a long-tail keyword such as ‘how to create a successful digital advertising campaign.’
By using the same words in your blog posts that your readers are using to find the books they want to read, you will pull them towards your site where they will find all of your lovely and beautifully written clean romance books!
In essence, good keywords enable visitors to locate your material, out of an almost unlimited supply of information on the internet, after searching for a relevant subject.
Keywords with fewer characters have a greater search volume. This implies that they are more difficult to rank for. Long-tail keywords have a lower search volume, but they are considerably more targeted. The benefit is that you may target the exact audience that is interested in it. It’s generally a good idea to mix long- and short-tail keywords together. Here you might like to try ‘clean romance’ alongside ‘spiritual journey of faith in finding love’ for example.
It’s critical to consider the search volume and ranking difficulty of the term you’re going to use. The search volume shows the amount of people who search for this term. Higher search traffic shows that the topic is more popular. The rank degree reveals how difficult it will be to appear in search engine results.
However, keyword research is not the only element to consider when it comes to optimizing a website. To increase traffic, you must also pay attention to other significant elements.
Place keywords throughout your page
There are many different relevant keywords on each page or blog post. The term “SEO for Beginners” appears in this blog post. That’s most likely the word you searched for and ended up here!
Ideally, your chosen keywords should be in the:
- Title of the post
- The URL
- The first and last paragraph of the post
- In the text organically throughout the post
- The tags of images used
Put them in, as long as they don’t disrupt the article’s flow! Just be wary of ‘Keyword Stuffing,’ which is forcing them in just for the sake of it or trying to hit a certain number of mentions per piece.
Include SEO in Permalinks
The URL you see when you go to a webpage is the permalink. Permalinks reveal a lot about your website’s overall structure, and they shouldn’t be overly long. They should also clearly describe the purpose of the page for both readers and bots crawling your website.
As previously said, search engine bots crawl all of your site’s pages to fully comprehend the theme of your site and properly index them. Make sure the words you use in your URL are distinct and informative.
For example, if you have an online book shop,, selling all of your lovely romance novels, provide the permalinks for people to see what they’re going to do and to contextualize the overall information. It aids SEO and makes the hierarchy apparent to search engines.
This could look like this:
- www.lovelybooks.com – is your website www.lovelybooks.com/cleanromance – can be a page where people can find all books in the clean romance category
- www.lovelybooks.com/selfhelp/BOOKTITLE – is the page where they’ll find information about a specific book in this category
A permalink is permanent, which makes it vital to choose the proper ones for your pages. It’s not suggested that you utilize dates or information that might change.
What is the significance of this? You should always keep your website fresh. Having a site that has been up for a while improves its SEO score. You don’t want to build pages that you’ll eventually remove.
Older pages do not rank just because they have been published for a long period of time. They rank due to the fact that over time, they were able to demonstrate authority through organic traffic, link building, and other methods. Getting the ability to modify your content with new and relevant information is critical, thus using a timeless URL structure is important.
Let’s assume you create an essay on ‘Top 5 Marketing Strategies for 2020.’ This is a wonderful topic! However, leave out the year 2020 in your permalink. You may modify the material and later talk about the ‘Top 5 Marketing Tips for 2021′ by leaving it out.
The same strategy applies to pages dedicated to particular holidays, like Black Friday. It happens annually, so it’s a good idea to reuse this page for years to come.
Conclusion
I think that’s enough for one day! I don’t want you to get overwhelmed by this topic as it is such an important one.
Be sure to stay tuned for the last in this three part series or SEO for beginners!
