Getting Visitors From Google

Writing and Links Attract Visitors From Search Engines

"Internet Book Marketing: An Author's Guide To Building An Online Marketing Platform", instant eBook download now available as a printable PDF for $9.95.

Excerpt from Internet Book Marketing:

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.

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.

"Internet Book Marketing: An Author's Guide To Building An Online Marketing Platform", instant eBook download now available as a printable PDF for $9.95.