Finding the right words is essential when writing your author website copy. Using effective keywords in the right places can help improve your search engine optimization (SEO) and drive much-needed traffic into your site. We’ve compiled some tips on how to use SEO keywords to your benefit.
First, Identify Your Best SEO Keywords
As an author, your best keywords are going to be your name (or pen name), your book titles, your genre, etc. Use them liberally!
1. Use Effective Keywords In Your Author Website Title
Make sure that the title of your author website includes your keywords. Keep your title succinct: Get rid of extraneous words or phrases. In general, the important keywords should appear at the front of your title. So make each word count!
2. Use Effective SEO Keywords In The First Sentence And The First Paragraph
Be sure to include your SEO keywords in your first sentence and first paragraph. It will also be important to continue including your keywords throughout the rest of your text, but your first sentence is key!
3. Use Effective Keywords In The Last Sentence And The Last Paragraph
Similarly, you’ll want to include keywords at the end of your text, just to wrap things up.
TIP: Leaving an open comment field at the bottom can get a conversation started. And the more people who use your keywords on your page, the better! Posing a question to be answered is an easy way to encourage discussion.
4. Use Effective SEO Keywords In Your Headers And Subheaders
You’ll want your copy to have plenty of headings and subheadings if applicable, all including those mighty keywords. The trick to writing an effective header is to keep it short, simple, and to the point.
Putting your most important headers in h1 tags (title tags) and your subheaders in h2 tags can also increase your SEO. It will create section breaks and more keyword content for sites like Google to pull from. Also, be sure to keep your most important keywords at the beginning of title, header, or subheader.
5. Use Your Web Links
When possible, link your keywords to pages that correspond with those keywords. Example: Link your book title to the page about your book. Link the words vampire fiction to the Wikipedia article on vampire literature. Users appreciate the shortcuts and search engines love to see a site that “makes sense” and offers visitors helpful information.
You can think of the Internet as a community, and your website is a part of it. You don’t want your site to be a dead end, so linking out to other sites and having them link to you is essential to building a healthy online presence.
Tips To Impress Your Author Website Visitors
So now you know how to impress search engine “spiders,” those robots that crawl websites to determine what they’re about. But how can you impress people with your author website text?
People have different experiences reading online documents versus physical books or magazines. They have different expectation, so be sure to follow these guidelines if you’re hoping to engage people as well as search engines. Most people online are looking for text that they can skim; be as succinct as possible.
Remember, online readers aren’tlooking for fancy language and big words; instead they’re looking for quick and easy content that will give them a lot of information in a short amount of time.
- The first sentence and the first paragraph of your content should make your point in the quickest and most efficient way possible.
- Use short sentences. In your creative writing, your sentences can be as long and flowing as you like. But on the Web, keep them short and skimmable. Only one main idea per sentence, please!
- Use short paragraphs. Readers will generally read the first sentence of your paragraph, then decide if they want to keep reading it or skim to the next one. Plus, long paragraphs are annoying, so keep them short and to the point.
- Use bullets, lists, and numbers to break up text. Again, it’s all about easy reading and skimming.
Self-Test for Author Website Text
Last but not least. We’ve put together some simple questions you can ask yourself to make sure all of the necessary bases have been covered.
- Does the headline engage, surprise, and excite the reader?
- Do the subheaders describe the article content all by themselves (using keywords)?
- Have you asked an engaging question at the end of your text to encourage comments and conversation (if that’s something you want to do)?
- Did you add a call to action for readers to buy your book or join your email list—if it’s possible to include a call to action in a natural way?
Question: When you surf the Web, do you find yourself searching for specific phrases/keywords? If so, share them here.
It’s so hard to write for robots and for people at hte same time! I’m looking forward to google being able to come up with more natural ways of searching.
Writing for both increases the chance of making it to the first page of a search result; some search engines would even analyze the text’s “fowl play trick” score, like excessive use of words/phrases/tags that have high hit rates but are “off” in the context of the website. A high score would take it pretty far from the first page of a search result.
Therefore, I think sentences that make sense to a human make a lot of sense in SEO.
WOW! Being a person who isn’t internet savvy, I had no idea what an SEO was! Thanks for this awesome post, guys!
I’m in the process of developing a blog and you guys have been such a big help! I’ve been finding that setting up a web page is, in a way, like starting a business – you don’t always think of the incidentals that are necessary in being successful like, in this case, SEO! Thanks as always for your helpful insight!