Help Readers Find your Author Website is part five of the Essential Elements of an Effective Author Website series.
Picture this: A golden retriever, lying on the floor next to your chair, hears a soft bang. He looks up, tilts his head and focuses on the sound. Will he have to leap into action or can he put his head back down on the floor and go to sleep?
Google is a little like that golden retriever. Every so often it tilts its digital head and listens for anything coming from your website.
If Google detects something new they leap into action, retrieving information, building new links, adding your fresh content to their search engine, and bumping up your ranking if they see the new information as useful.
If it sees the same thing that was there yesterday, or last week, or even last month, it puts its head back down and rests – no longer paying attention to your author website.
New content is the lifeblood of any website
This post is not to try and convince you to blog on a regular basis at your site. I personally think you should, and there are hundreds of topics that would be of interest to your readers, but I understand that most of you won’t consider it. That’s okay. It’s nice, but not essential.
What is essential is fresh content on a regular basis.
That content could come in the form of news, or updates, or new books, teaser chapters, links to reviews or dozens of other things.
Blog or News?
If you blog, you can use your blog to add all of this, but if you don’t, you need a menu item for it.
Some authors call this menu item News, What’s New, Updates, or dozens of other short, clever names. Whatever you want to call your page, that’s the place where you’ll add things as they happen, or you can use your blog for these little tidbits of information.
Did you just publish an article on The Huffington Post? Link to it here. Were you just interviewed by a local radio station? Write a couple of paragraphs and link to it. Did your guest post just go live on Jungle Red Writers? Same advice – Post something on your site and link to the site where the readers can get the full story.
Then, when you post something new to your website, share it and encourage your friends and followers to share it as well. Sharing posts and news items from your website on social media is one of the very best ways of getting people to your site.
Your blog or the news section of your site informs readers that you’re active in the publishing world, allowing them to find those witty posts you wrote on your last blog tour. And of course, the biggest benefit is waking up the golden retriever that is Google and letting them know that you’re creating new content and linking with other popular websites.
The Essential Elements of an Effective Author Website series continues with a lesson quickly sharing your story as an author with site visitors.
If you’d like to download the entire series as an e-book, that will be available soon. You can signup to receive a free copy the minute it becomes available by clicking the button below.
Creative Commons image via SKEEZE
