jeanette mccarthy
by jeanette
Abandoned - a novel of survival
url of your site: Well, Jeanette, you've taken the first steps in website self improvement: you've asked for a review and you've signed up for my newsletter. Congrats and thank you! Now, let's distinguish between two types of sites: we'll call them the Calling Card site and the Built For Traffic site. Yours is a perfectly respectable Calling Card site. People you know and meet can be sent to it with no fear of embarrassment! Is your site Built For Traffic, that is, are the search engines going to find much reason to send you visitors? Not in the least. Let's start with your domain name. It is YOUR name, and you're not famous. (Yet!) Worse still, it's not a particularly uncommon name. You compete for attention with all the other Jeanette McCarthys. Your url's don't help. page2.html tells the engines much less than BooksByJeanette.html You see, the web is all about a search for FREE information. The engines value sites that are repositories of free information on a narrowly defined, yet oft-searched subject. How to BUY Jeanette McCarthy's books, I'm sorry to say, is not a popular search. And a site that covers... border collies ptsd writers' groups, and Scottish tourist attractions ...can hardly be said to be narrowly focused! So your site, and your similarly self-named blog (blogging, by the way, poses its own problems, aren't anything Google is apt to get excited about. In fact, Google assigns your home page a PageRank of zero and doesn't even bother to assign one to your blog. This despite the tons of links you've received from your activity on mywriterscircle.com For one thing, your Links page actually says something negative about your site. It tells the engines, "If other sites link to me, it's likely because I give links back to them." Better to link to other sites in context, as you do to mywriterscircle on your Station Shorts page. What can you do? Well, regardless of whether you start from scratch (best option) or try to make the best of the site you already have, your best hope is to start taking seriously your sacred web responsibility of providing a goodly amount of information that people want! (Then, hopefully, you can convert some of those visitors into paying customers.) Your site offers some hints at what you could offer. Free short stories You offer your own short stories for free on your site. As previously mentioned, FREE is something folks are looking for. On my children's books website, I offer free online children's stories. In fact, if you search FREE CHILDREN'S BOOKS on the day I write this, I come up #1 in Google! Perhaps you could create a site (or a section of your existing site) where you link to other short stories on the web. You could catalogue them and say a little about each. (Text is what attracts search engines, not pages full of links.) Now you're offering information people are looking for. Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome I gather that your research on the Mike character in Abandoned left you with some good knowledge on PTSD. Perhaps you could create a resource on that subject. Use what you've learned twice! Online Writers' Groups and Support Your clear attachment to your fellow posters at mywriterscircle.com suggests another possibility. Perhaps you could become a reviewer of online writer sites. Tell what each offers and how well they offer it. Character Creation What you did with Station Shorts suggests you give a lot of good thought into what it takes to bring characters alive. Perhaps you're the person to create a resource on conjuring fully developed characters. Border Collie Information I give this as an example of a BAD idea for a section on your site. While you may well be the world's foremost expert on the breed, I see no confluence between that subject and the book you're trying to sell. So even if you attracted visitors with your border collie resource, they likely would have no inclination to buy your book! I want to be clear about one thing: attracting real traffic on the web is hard work. It requires, among other things, creating a site that perfect strangers will have a reason to visit. You really have to look no further than this site for an example. I'm a writer, like you, but I realize that I'm really of little interest to people who don't know me. (Through my site, I hope to let them get to know me.) I also realize that if I don't create anything of value - and offer it for free - the engines will have no reason or incentive to send me free traffic! And so I've created this huge site (250 pages in less than 3 months so far), filled with great info on the subject of self publishing, info created by people who have done it...like you. Now think: how long would Google be the search engine of choice if, when a searcher typed in BOOKS, they sent that searcher to jeanettemccarthy.co.uk instead of Amazon? Not too long. So my best advice is to create something of value for others. Once the traffic comes, figure out how best to turn those people into something of value for yourself. Good luck!
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