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Christian Fantasy Author
by William Woodall
Christian Fantasy Author William Woodall's Site
Site: williamwoodall.org William, thanks for coming by. Readers, William posted about his self publishing efforts at Self Publishing Christian Fantasy. You'll want to read that post AND the comments because I've already given William some feedback on his site. In fact, I'm going to start by addressing a couple of your comments on that page, William. First, you spoke of the importance of a domain name having to be "short and memorable." I don't think that's true! A domain name that captures keywords of importance to your audience is much more important if you're going to look to the search engines for your traffic. And I recommend that EVERYONE look to the search engines, because the universe of people who DON'T know you or meet you is so much larger than the universe of people who DO have William Woodall awareness. Your goal on the internet is to market yourself to strangers. You'll notice that this website eschews any "rules" about shortness and having to smash words together. I use the dreaded hyphen! Easier for potential visitors to read when they see it in the browser. You also speak of not knowing how many people browse from one of your sites to the other, as well as of not knowing how many of your visitors come courtesy of the search engines. I recommend installing Google Analytics on all your sites. You won't just know who is coming from where, you'll practically know what they had for dinner. Now we've already discussed that the engines look at domain names for clues to what you're about. They also use it as a factor in their search rankings. (As evidenced by the fact that Google ranks you #3 for WILLIAM WOODALL and you're nowhere to be found for CHRISTIAN FANTASY.) But what you're not communicating to the engines goes way beyond that. Go to your site. Look at the blue bar atop your browser. It says, "Home." That's because in your "meta" (code that the engines read that's invisible to visitors) you titled your page Home. This is ALSO what the engines typically use as your blue link text when your page does manage to come up in search rankings. But I see that Google has taken pity upon you and given you instead the Welcome that appears in the headline atop your home page. That's still not good. This is link text, and you want to say something that gets the click from the searchers you're hoping will find you. Meta also gives you a chance to communicate to the engines a description of each page on your site, as well as the keywords you're hoping to rank for. You're giving them none of this. Basically, you're telling the engines "I have no idea how you work or what you need." You're dissin' 'em! Imagine you're a search engine. Did you know you can't read? You can recognize words and phrases and the frequency with which they appear on a page, and you can match this with your database of how often people search for those words and phrases. So when you're scanning a page about one of Christian Fantasy author William Woodall's books - say Cry for the Moon - yet the words Christian and Fantasy are nowhere in evidence, either on the viewable page or in the meta, you're confused. Is it about astronomy? Crying? The phrase "God's grace" appears, but there are whole websites about that and so an engine isn't going to rank you just for mentioning it once. I just typed CRY FOR THE MOON into Google and got a good news, bad news scenario. The bad news is that it's also a title of a popular song, so you don't even come up in the rankings for your own title. The good news is that discountbooksale.com is willing to pay for clicks to your book, and so you showed up in the sponsored listings. If that stops happening, then you're not going to be found even when people are looking for your work. I'm afraid that's a symptom of an ailing website. Back to keywords. Here's a "poor man's" keyword tool, courtesy of Google. Play with it a little. You'll find that 2900 people a month search CHRISTIAN FANTASY. 49,500 search CHRISTIAN FICTION. (590 search WILLIAM WOODALL, but they appear to be mostly other William Woodalls. There's a good chance that what search engine traffic you do get is from those searchers, and that they then click immediately away. Not of much use to you!) You mentioned getting traffic from direct links. Did you know that the main value of links TO a healthy site is not the traffic they bring? You see, the engines value sites largely on the basis of how many other sites link to them. Think of each link as a VOTE for the importance of that site! Yahoo reports 14 inbound links for williamwoodall.org and 368 for this site. That's why your page on this site is likely to rank higher for CHRISTIAN FANTASY than your own site! (And I've juggled the meta a bit in order to get better outcomes. Among other things, I've changed the titles you gave to your pages here in order to increase traffic.) I started on the web like most people, just throwing up a site that did and said what I wanted it to, without thinking about what the search engines needed. It got no traffic. I'd check every day to see if I was ranking for certain searches that I imagined would find me. Then I focused on that really distressing part of the search results page that most of us try to ignore. Stare at that too long and you're likely to go insane! Or start buying lottery tickets, because your chances of showing up on that first page without knowing how the engines work are about the same as your winning the Powerball. I look at your blog and see those book reviews you do. I despair that they'll ever be seen. They belong on a site called best-christian-fiction or some such. There they would attract traffic that could then be steered towards your books. Or you would sell that other author's book and make a nice commission on it. (Something I see you're not set up to do. You might want to visit Amazon Associates.) Imagine yourself with a search engine simpatico site. You're pulling in traffic for CHRISTIAN FANTASY and CHRISTIAN FICTION and PUBLISHING CHRISTIAN FICTION (because you've written pages on those specific subjects and given them proper meta), and because the engines know what you're about they're ranking you highly not only for those terms but for the very popular books and authors you're reviewing. (C.S. Lewis: 301,000 Google searches per month!) Don't think it's possible for a one man operation to rank highly with the search engines? Google In summary, William, your creative output is not being rewarded! You need to create content in such a way that the search engines value it and reward you accordingly. I've mentioned the company I use, Site Build It, and I'm mentioning it to you with some urgency since you have a web presence that spans a number of sites and interests. SBI has a special where you can get all there tools for making TWO sites, and they give you the 2nd site for 2/3 off. But the special runs out Sunday, June 21. I can't help thinking this is perfect for you. When you buy SBI, you buy it for a year. (It ain't cheap, but neither is effort, which I fear you're wasting!) With the special though, you can stop the clock on the 2nd site from ticking for up to 9 months. That means you could focus on your book site, then use the second site at your convenience for either your publishing, counseling or ministry endeavors. (Where do you find the time???) Okay, I'm looking at the clock and I can't believe where my time has gone! I hope this gives you some things to think about. Site Build It can be ordered from here. Thanks for listening. Steve
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