Writing and Reputation Make Your Publishing Website Popular

Links And Reputation

If you do everything else right, create a beautiful website full of well written, compelling content that has meaning and utility to large numbers of people, and you don't get any links, you haven't achieved a thing. I can't put it any stronger than this, without incoming links, an author's website is essentially invisible. The search engines will index the site if you tell them it's there, you might even get the occasional visitor on some obscure phrase or proper name, but it's no different from starting a walk-in business in a private home with no signage, no word-of-mouth and no phone listing. Links = reputation; they are the life blood of the world wide web, and they come in three basic varieties. Incoming links are critical in establishing the value of your site and helping search engines determine what other people think your site is all about. Outgoing links help the search engines determine which neighborhood you live in and what you think your own site is about. Internal links let people navigate your website, establish the webmaster's view of page popularity, and reinforce how the search engines categorize your content.

The standard method of displaying links on the Internet is to show a bit of text as underlined, or to have that text perform an action (like a button being pushed in) when your mouse pointer floats over it. Click on the link, and it will take you to a new web page, either on the same website, in the case of an internal navigation link, or to a page on another website, in the case of an external link. Some websites consist of nothing but a collection of links to other websites, with a description or ranking of those other sites. Yahoo! got it's start as an authority site, providing links to sites in different categories that had been reviewed by human editors to see if they really contained useful content. Creating such authority sites on a smaller scale is still a popular activity with hobbyists and experts, who publish collections of links to sites that they have discovered themselves and found useful. Such authority sites often demand link exchanges. They are happy to link to your site, providing it has legitimate content and you provide a link in return. I'm not really comfortable with this model and I don't participate in any link swapping myself. But if that's what it takes to get your website listed in a couple of carefully selected authority sites when you start out and you're having trouble getting links without quid-pro-quos, it's worth trying. But make sure they are legitimate authority sites that have been around for years doing the same thing before exchanging links. You can check the history of a website by using the WayBack Machine at www.archive.org.

I'm not sure anybody has a good count of the number of search engines out there, but for searching in English, only three matter: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Of the three, Google is dominant, and drives more than twice as much true search traffic than the other two combined. What I mean by "true" traffic is searches initiated by people who sit down at the computer and think, "I'm going to search for something", often saying, "I'm going to Google it." People still use the Microsoft and Yahoo search engines, but my feeling is they use those other search engines primarily because they happen to be using the Yahoo! portal (news, e-mail, groups) or the Microsoft portal (news, finance, Hotmail) or Microsoft software that defaults to the Microsoft search. Toolbars provided by Yahoo! and Microsoft for the browser are another reason people use their search, the dialog box for entering queries is always right there on the toolbar. But to be an effective consumer of web intelligence, you must install the Google toolbar and accept the terms that give you access to the PageRank display.

So much has been written about PageRank and its importance that it would be foolish to try to read it all, much less to summarize it in a single paragraph. But I'm going to try to accomplish the latter, and you can be the judge. PageRank, often shortened to PR in correspondence on the subject, is expressed by the Google Toolbar as a green bar meter, which shows a number from 0 to 10 when you float the mouse pointer over it. A page rank of 0 is very bad unless the page is new, a page rank of 10 is very good and beyond reach, a page rank of 4 is more than adequate to get most content good visibility in search results when it's highly relevant to the users search query. PageRank is far from being the only criteria that Google uses in determining which web pages to return in their search results, and how to rank them, but it's a good indicator of what Google thinks about the overall quality of a website. A website with a high PageRank is a valuable piece of internet real estate, just like bricks-and-mortar retail space in a high traffic area. Because it is based on links, PageRank = reputation.

But PageRank is not exactly equivalent to the concept of "neighborhood" I keep talking about. Neighborhoods can be good or bad, and PageRank is usually a pretty good indicator of that, but neighborhoods can also be ethnic, or specialist, in web terms. If you write primarily about medical forensics, as either a fiction author or a medical professional, the best links for you to get are those from sites related to forensics. While a link from a high PageRank site about raising iguanas as pets will help the PageRank of your site, it will do nothing to improve your standing in the forensics neighborhood. Too many such unrelated high PR links may even prejudice an intelligent search engine against your site, in terms of forensics visibility, since the search engines are inclined to trust the accuracy of high value linkers in characterizing the true relevancy of your content. So don't get caught up in the game of collecting links from whoever you can and trying to build the integer value of your PageRank. Concentrate on attracting links from sites relevant to your topic, and if you can find relevant sites with good PageRanks willing to link you, that's even better..

When other websites provide links to your publishing website, they may simply link your domain name, or your home page, rather than linking to a page with some specific content of interest. While any quality incoming links help, deep links, or links directly to pages on your site that address a certain subset of a subject or very specific topic, are usually more valuable in building a presence. These deep links help elevate that specific page in the eyes of the search engine for the particular points it addresses, especially if the context of the link on the site providing it is clearly related. Thanks to deep linking, a single website can exist in multiple neighborhoods. Once your website is established in the eyes of the search engines as having value in one neighborhood, you can easily expand out from there, and your new content will derive some benefit from your existing reputation.

The best incoming links to get are links from related sites, even sites that may compete with your site for visitors, but who are motivated to link you by some unique content on your site. A good example of this is my analysis of what Amazon sales ranks say about how many copies of that book Amazon is selling. There are hundreds of unsolicited external links pointing to this page on my website, it's refered to in a half-dozen academic papers, and it remains a unique presentation some nine years after I first published it (with occasional updates). I'd found a problem to write about that I was personally obsessed with at the time, and I was able to apply my oddball background to coming up with a solution. The difficulty of the problem, combined with the fact that nobody is willing to pay for a solution, meant I didn't have any competition. While I didn't know it at the time, that article and all of the incoming links it earned helped launch my site as a publishing resource and platform. The reason all those publishing and writing sites were willing to link my page was because they wanted to express an opinion based on the content, and linking back to the source was almost an necessity to make their argument.

Outgoing links are also valuable in terms of establishing your neighborhood, though somewhat less valuable than the incoming links. I don't link outside sites unless I am writing about them, quoting from them, or want people to be aware of them as a reference. Many web designers take a different approach, linking well established sites simply in hope of being included in their neighborhood. It may help, but it's not enough in and of itself, for the same reason that repeating the phrase "I'm an expert on banking" over and over again on your site is unlikely to get Google to send you visitors looking for a banking expert. The people who write the software algorithms that produce the search results know that many people building websites are trying to cheat the system. Some are out and out liars and feel no shame about creating websites designed to sell "adult" materials, but disguised to draw visitors from unrelated subjects, including preschool education. The only way the search engines have to differentiate between the tricksters and the legitimate websites is to emphasize the measures that aren't easy to lie about, like the value and context of incoming links. Outgoing links are entirely within the control of the person who writes the web page, so there's nothing to prevent the the scam artist from extensively linking some unrelated subject in a good neighborhood to try to improve his own standing. So, while outgoing links make sense when there's a good reason to include them, they won't help much with positioning your own site until you've won the trust of the search engines through incoming links.

Internal links are important to help break up the content on your website into navigable chunks for visitors and to keep multiple subjects from getting watered down in search engine algorithms. For example, if you have fifty pages on your website, thirty about criminal justice, twelve about animal husbandry, and eight about the genealogy of the Swedish royal family, you don't want every one of those pages to link to every other page on the site. For one thing, it will look like a real mess to your readers, but more importantly, it will dilute the value of the individual subjects in the eyes of the search engines. Your home page at the main domain address, www.yourdomain.com, should contain links to the major categories on your site, and maybe every page if there are a hundred or fewer pages, but other than that, the distinct subjects should stand alone. Furthermore, if a specific subject area is normally broken into smaller divisions academic or professional usage, you should probably follow the same pattern. If your thirty pages about criminal justice are evenly split between pages about detective work and pages about the court system, manage the internal links accordingly.

The internal and outgoing links are entirely within your control, but getting valuable incoming links from external sites can be a real challenge for new websites. One of the reasons it's important to get off the couch and put a significant amount of content online is that people aren't going to link to a site that has a pretty design, your biography, and an advertisement for your book. There's no point in asking people for links before you've created a website with something of genuine value, and you'll decrease the chances that those people will even look at your e-mail in the future if you've wasted their time once already. As with much of the home construction industry, website building must be done "on spec", on the speculation that the work you do now is creating value for the future. If you lack the knowledge to say something about a subject that interests you, don't waste your time writing about it, for a book or the web. Write what you know, and if what you know isn't what you want to build a platform on, you have a problem unrelated to web design.

Content and Writing

When I get the itch to start writing about something new, I immediately start posting the rough drafts on my publishing website. I don't run the pages past my editor, I barely read them over more than once myself. The idea is to have the new pages discovered by the search engines as soon as possible, and to start getting reactions from the people for whom I'm writing. The five different reactions I look for are unrelated to the five senses, but I like to think they give me a pretty complete picture of the world this new work is living in. The most important reaction I look for is positive feedback from readers. If complete strangers send me e-mails thanking me for taking the time to write the page or even asking when the book will be available, I know I've got a popular book project on my hands. The second reaction I look for is bad feedback or people questioning my methods or conclusions. If people e-mail me suggesting I have it all wrong or asking me questions that I either don't understand or thought I already explained in full, I know that either I'm not reaching the right audience or they aren't finding the right website. In both instances, they certainly won't be giving me any links to increase the visibility of my work, and it may well be that I'm writing for an audience of one.

The third reaction I look for is from the search engines, how they rank my new content for related searches and whether they are sending me the type of visitors I expected. If I've posted a page that I thought would be an immediate popular success because my website already has authority in a related field, and instead, the search engines only send a handful of visitors a day, I generally get discouraged and give up. Alright, I always get discouraged an give up. The fourth reaction I look for is the amount of time visitors to the page spend reading it. While not an exact measure, the average number means something, as in pages that are above average are probably being judged good reading. The fifth reaction I look for is external linking, how many people who've found the page choose to tell others about it, through links on their websites, in blog posts, in discussion groups, comments or published articles. All these external links show up in the search engines or in my own website monitoring program.

The name of the game is content. In the online world, "content" means the stuff you put on your website that gets people to come and visit. If your content is good, they may stay awhile, or come back another time, or that best of possible outcomes, tell all their friends. The web is rapidly overfilling with all sorts of rich media, including full motion video and streaming audio. When you've become a successful author with a large fan base, you might want to add some of that stuff to your website, but when you're starting out, it's neither necessary nor particularly useful. You see, the effort and the expense involved in creating rich media only makes sense if you have a large number of visitors willing to sit through it, whether it's educational or entertainment. Merely having video and audio files available for playing won't attract anybody to your website to play them. Despite the best efforts of some of the smartest people on the globe, Internet search remains largely a text based phenomena.

Fortunately, text is what we do as authors, which is why the Internet is an ideal place for an unknown to build a platform and become known. The only content required to build a serious author website is text, engaging text, and lots of it. If your work can be enhanced by photographs or graphics, adding them is an easy way to increase the value of the site in the eyes of your readers. But images aren't vitally necessary, and won't bring you many visitors in and of themselves. It's the text you write that really matters to the search engines, and they parse and dissect that text in an attempt to present their users with useful results. The search engines don't care too much about how finely tuned your grammar is or the skill with which you turn a phrase, which is why I encourage you to publish draft material as you write it. I also encourage you to register a copyright for your website content on a regular basis.

Some authors spend so much time polishing their work that they treat content creation as some full-time task that's beyond their capacity. I'm not going to tell you to write badly, but I am going to tell you that in the initial stages of creating a website, there's something to be said for letting your inner slob hang out and getting the job done. We aren't talking about a poetry website here, if your goal is to become acknowledged as a professional poet, you're doomed even if you do succeed. The whole point of creating a author website is to contribute to your chances of commercial success, to be picked up by a quality trade publisher or to promote your published books. The text content on your website fills that function by attracting readers through search engines and letting them read for free. In over ten years of publishing on the Internet, I've received well over ten thousand e-mails from strangers, and while one in a thousand may write to point out this or that typo, nobody has ever complained about getting to read the content for free. People have better things to do with their time than to read web pages they don't find informative or entertaining, and if they stay on your site long enough read something and find your e-mail address, it means the content is doing its job.

So what is this text content I keep going on about, and how do you write it? The most obvious place for authors to start gathering content for their websites is from material they've already written. It could be book manuscripts, research notes, published or unpublished papers written for professional or educational requirements. It could be the letters or e-mails you wrote your friends or relatives while researching the setting for a fictional scene set in Florence, though you might want to edit out any references to the personal lives of your correspondents. As long at it's related in some way to online presence you're trying to establish and it's not stolen from another writer, it's all good starting grist for the mill. There's nothing wrong with having a website contain content on multiple, entirely unrelated fields, you just have to organize it so that neither your readers or the search engines get confused. The only caveat I'd offer on letting it all hang out is that you run the risk of offending people who might otherwise become readers and book buyers. Politics is a pretty dumb subject to discuss on your website unless publishing political tomes is your goal, and indulging in personal biases (don't we all hate mauve haired people) is a pretty stupid move unless you're trying to build a platform as a racist. Remember the joke about the two old ladies complaining about the food in the Catskills? One says, "The food here is horrible," and the other says, "Yes, and the portions are so small!" The problem with most existing author websites I've reviewed is simple. They have the bad content, and not nearly enough of it.

The challenge in using content that you've already written is a question of how much to give away and how to structure the presentation on your website. If the material isn't part of a manuscript or a published book, the more the better. If you're talking about a book you're in the process of writing, like this one I'm writing now, I'm comfortable with posting the rough draft as I go along and making the decision about how much of the finished book to put online when I get there. In the meantime, the draft chapters can start the page maturation process that will help them draw visitors down the road when they are replaced with the permanent content. It also helps with search engine visibility to clump like bits of your website together, which will get a more technical treatment later on. Publishing a web pages isn't like printing 10,000 books, the modern equivalent of carving something in stone. If you decide you want to do a complete rewrite, drop a key concept or character, or add a major new facet to your work, you can always change it. New visitors to your website will never know that the older version existed, and returning visitors don't have any grounds for complaint. Remember, they haven't paid for anything.

Using pre-existing related content, such as a travelogue you don't plan to bring out as a book, research notes, letters home and other writing, doesn't carry with it any question of how sales may be impacted. The rule of thumb for design with such content is to break it up into the largest chunks that can be clearly described in a title. For example, if it was important for your book research to determine what activity took place on the Brooklyn Bridge every Sunday morning for a year, I'd put all 52 weeks of it on a single page, rather than creating 52 individual short pages that will inevitably repeat similar themes. On the other hand, if you collected a couple dozen local recipes on a writing related trip, they should each get their own page, unless there are families of recipes using similar ingredients. In other words, similar bits of related content should always get clumped together to give weight to your authority, while diverse bits of related content should get their own web pages. All related content is then connected through the site navigation, the clickable links you usually find in the margins of web pages.

But the most effective content for building a platform that establishes you as the go-to person for a particular subject is content you write specifically for that purpose. The problem that confronts many authors is that they aren't exactly sure what platform they should be building. It's a particularly thorny question for fiction writers, who can't count on their finished writing to make a whole lot of sense to search engines. The visitors a search engine sends to a fiction page are usually looking for some information that happens to be mentioned on the page, but not in the context that the visitor is seeking. The likelihood of converting a misdirected visitor into a reader or a customer is very low. But most fiction is typically written in genres, and fiction writers tend to be knowledgeable about the genre in which they are writing. The best approach for an unknown fiction writer trying to build a website platform is to write nonfiction about the genre, about the classics of the art, about the books written by other authors, and perhaps most importantly, the publishers and editors of those other books. In this way, the aspiring authors can do their homework about the business they are trying to break into at the same time they are building a web presence. Of course, it makes sense to present their own fiction on the site as well, even prominently. Nobody will complain.

Of course, one of the main points of publishing online is to find out how people react to your work before commiting to killing a tree. The most practical way to get feedback over the Internet is by e-mail, but that can also open the door to even more spam than you are already getting. With twelve years experience of posting my contact information online, the best compromise I've come up with is represented by my contact page. My e-mail address doesn't appear as real text for the bots to pick up, but as a graphic. The instructions tell you to add the number 1903 to the subject line to ensure passage thorugh my spam filter. I tell you I don't accept attachments (people try sending them anyway). Having a contact page rather than placing the information on every page of my website means that I only have to change it in one place, if I decide to change the code, the address, or go on vacation.