Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a vast and complicated topic with ever changing best practices. Google changes their rules on a regular basis (for example, we used to be told to remove prepositions and other useless words from a page’s URL, but that no longer matters), and it’s hard for even a tech expert like myself to keep up.

I was recently reviewing SEO for a talk I will be giving in a few weeks, and I thought it would help all of us if I pulled together a short list of useful tips.

1, Think about what you really want to accomplish.

SEO is a particularly complicated topic for authors because where most people focus on SEO for their website, authors might want to also focus on the SEO for their book pages on Amazon and other retailers. The reason I suggest this is that while getting visitors to your website is important, book sales are also important, and authors might want to prioritize both goals by working on the SEO for their site and for their book pages.

This post focuses on website SEO, but these two posts may help with Amazon.

2, You can’t expect your site to be indexed by Google.

It used to be that Google would index every page whether you wanted it to or not. This is why there were metadata tags to prevent it. But now that the web has grown so big, Google is more selective. There have been times where I almost had to force Google to index a site.

Getting Google to index your site may require hiring an expert, but you can at least check to make sure your site is showing up in their search results. You can do this by using the “Site:” tag to search Google for only your site. Basically, you will need to use it like this:

site:YourSitename.com

You should also Google your site’s name, and its domain (YourSitename.com). If your site doesn’t show up when googling for one of these terms, you have a problem.

3, SEO is a subjective topic.

The original definition of SEO included things which would improve your site’s ranking in Google: links from other sites, keywords, well-written content, etc.

But in the past few years SEO experts have expanded the meaning of the term SEO to include what I would call marketing: product placement, hiring a TikTok influencer, FB adverts, and even vehicle wraps. Basically,  anything that gets someone’s attention so they Google your name is now considered SEO.

I think they did this because the old SEO tricks, the ones that improve your search ranking,  don’t work as well as they used to. This forced them to find new services to offer.

That said, the old ways do still work and should not be ignored.

4,  Keywords are still King.

One of the tried and true parts of SEO are keywords. A keyword is basically a word you want someone to find your site under when they type that word into Google.

You’ll need to choose the keywords for each of the pages on your site, and this is worth spending some time on. There’s fierce competition for certain keywords, but it is possible to find search terms no one else is targetting. For example, I know an editor who is ranking high on “military editor” just by using the keywords, and other simple tricks.

5, Titles & headlines still matter.

While keywords are important, Google no longer looks for them in a webpage’s metadata. Instead, Google now looks for the keywords in a page’s title, and also the section headlines. This is why you should choose titles which use your keywords.

For example, do you see how this post uses “SEO” and “Authors” in its title? I did that not just to be clear to the reader, but also to help this post rank better.

And do you see how the title and key points are in a larger font? That is because they are wrapped in heading tags, which tells both visitors and Google what is most important about this page.

6, Content rules.

The one most important part of SEO in 2024 is the content on each page of your site. It needs to be well-written, and it needs to use the keywords you chose. Basically, Google wants your site to have the best content you can provide.

This presents a problem for authors because a lot of the content on an author site, including the book blurbs, book covers, and even the author bio, are oftentimes identical to the content found on retail bookstore sites. It’s going to look like your has duplicate content, which is why you should also look at how you can add content to your site which is unique.

Blog posts are good, and also background material on your books. Anything which isn’t being used on another site, and would interest your readers, would be a good addition.

7, It all needs to link together.

Links were one of the first things Google used to rank webpages, and they are still important today.  You can improve your website’s SEO by getting more sites to link to your site, and also by being smart about how you link your pages together.

Obviously you should have a well-organized menu, but it would also be good if you had links in each page’s content which lead to other pages on your site.  The links of course need to be relevant (for example, one of your new blog posts might link back to older blog posts, or a related page on your website).

—-

The 7 tips mentioned above are just the beginning of what you need to know about SEO. They are a good starting point, but if you want to go further, you might want to get this book. In addition to having good advice on SEO, it’s also really useful for improving your website (I wish I had written it).

Oh, and if you want another couple SEO tips, you should think about making your site load faster and also be more mobile-friendly. Google checks both of those details, and uses them to rank websites.