Karina Kantas Author of In Times of Violence
by Karina Kantas
Karina's website
url of your site: http://www.freewebs.com/froget Karina, thanks for being so open to improvement. Readers, know that there's already been some discussion about Karina's website. Firstly, regarding only being able to afford a free site, know that there are free hosting services that don't insist on plastering your page with ads. (Though it could be they require more html knowledge than freewebs.) The one I use for a hobby site is freehostia. Just buy your domain name through them - you can't afford $10-$20? - and you qualify for the free, ad-free hosting. Domain names, by the way, are important. As I mentioned in my other post, they are part of what the search engines use to determine the subject of your site. You're using freewebs and the subdomain froget. So essentially you're giving the engines no help. (Actually, you might even be confusing them. They're hip to misspellings and typos, and froget - whatever it means - is a transposition of forget. So you might be leading them to think you have a poorly written site on Alzheimers!) So if /froget is easy to change, consider doing that. The search engines will lose track of you for a bit, but they're not sending you much anyway. Perhaps /urbanthriller. One piece of good news: page names also tell the engines something about a page's contents. I'm pleased to see you're naming your pages according to their content, rather than "page1," "page2," etc. Speaking of content (that is, words), let's talk for a moment about its importance. The web remains primarily a written medium, and the overwhelming majority of search is text-based. Ergo... All things being equal, the more text on your site (or anyone's site) the more chances to divert your search engine traffic your way. A website is like a fishing net; the bigger the site, the more "fish" you'll catch. That said, I'm not sure you benefit from your blog. A blog is a bit of a trap (not a net!); to be relevant, it requires constant updating. What does your blog, with the most recent of its 10 or so posts dated 6 months ago, tell the search engines? Probably nothing particularly good. "Old news," perhaps. I think the notion Kevin gave you about an Amazon blog is probably a better bet. And regarding what I was positing in that other post about writing a new site on the subject of urban literature... Do think about it. If you see it as a growth genre, wow. There's nothing better than becoming a big fish in a small but growing pond. It's a lot easier than becoming that fish once the pond is already a lake. (And we'll leave the inelegant metaphor right there.) As I was saying before, the best way I know of to sell an urban thriller is to build a site on the subject of urban lit. The engines send searchers to information resources, not to one author sites. Or put another way... The search engines are in the business of finding free information on a subject. Someone who searches urban thrillers is looking for that information. Google's job is to send them to a site that will let them find the information they want. They might be looking for an urban thriller to buy, but they weren't looking for Google to make the recommendation...and Google isn't looking to either. Google hasn't read your book, and they have no reason to recommend it over every other book in the genre. Yet that's the unrealistic hope that most authors seem to have when they put up their sites! Even if there are only 100 books in your genre, what are the chances of a one author site coming in at the top of the search heap? Nil. The site that speaks to all 100 of those books is the one that's most likely to prevail...and SHOULD prevail. Now when the time comes to ditch your freewebs site...don't. Or at least don't ditch the content. (You might move it to a less offensive free host.) Due to that "big net" analogy I used earlier (there are definitely too many fish in this post), content is never wasted. Neither are links. Build your new site, then interlink between it and the old site liberally. This "introduces" your new site to the search engines, and the interlinking tells the engines that BOTH sites are more important than if those links weren't there. The search engines - Google in particular - determine search rankings largely by how many pages and sites link to yours. It's their best indicator of merit. I call this approach "side by site." Build the new, but don't trash the old. It still has value. Advice for the site in its current state? Lose that reddish font that almost completely disappears against the purple background on some of your pages. Consider whether that background is causing your pages to load too slowly. It can take awhile, even though I have great download speeds. I don't know about where you are, but there are still some folks in this country with dial up. They would probably click away before your site loads. I'm not up on my computer coding, but I sure don't see the point of that scrolling frame you have on each page. It might be slowing down how you load, and having a scroll bar next to a scroll bar just seems silly. Does freewebs require it? The only benefit seems to be that it keeps their advertising always visible, dominating YOUR site. Yuck! Make sure all your pages are generously interlinked. Consider changing your "meta" to reflect the contents of each separate page. Also, there's a misspelling in your "meta description," seling, not selling. I think that's all I have. I hope it was some help!
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