lorrondon.com
by Margaret Garside
The Lorrondons' Home Page
Site: The Lorrondon's Homepage Margaret, it's certainly a nice looking site. Your cover image is attractive. The gray on black is soothing, rather than overpowering. Now, let's make a distinction. Let's say there are destination sites, and search-engine friendly sites. A destination site is one that primarily receives traffic YOU send to it. A search-engine friendly site is one that the search engines find because it offers good information on a popular topic. Yours is a destination site, through and through. It announces itself as such right from the top. It's "The Lorrondons' Homepage." Translation: If you don't know who the Lorrondons are, you're not likely to have searched for and found this page. In fact, by announcing it as The Lorrondons Homepage, you're actually suggesting it's a fan site - a site for people who have already read the book, rather than folks you're trying to sell it to. That all may be okay with you. But if you were expecting your site to attract the attention of strangers worldwide who might be persuaded to buy your book, I think you're going to be disappointed with the results. On top of that, I wasn't able to find a way to buy your book except from the Links page. A links page suggests to most surfers kind of a throwaway page. (Not that I wouldn't love it if you put The Shared Self Publishing Experience on it!) It's the page where you practice "If you rub my back, I'll rub yours." When I see a links page, I expect to see sites listed that on their sites link to your site. (Did you follow that?) That's called a link exchange. It's not where I expect to go to buy your book. Now, the most dynamic part of your site is your blog. There I discover that you're an opinionated, expressive person with a gift for expressing herself. The bad news? It's a blog. As I said, it's well-written. But I don't think it's information people know to be searching for. And I couldn't help noticing your first post, entitled A Website At Last: I've been meaning to do this for some time. After all, I'm trying to drum up interest in my book, The Bretton Katt Alliance. The wisdom these days says that real writers have websites. So here I am. Real writers may have websites, but most writers I know of are disappointed in the results. I guess the way I look at it is, "Successful writers have real websites." Here's what I mean Think about how you yourself use the web, because it's likely how most other people use it too. Do you wake up and say, "I'm going to find some blogs to read"? When you're looking for the next science fiction novel on your reading list, do you want your favorite search engine to simply assign you one randomly? I'm guessing your answers to both questions are No. Yet I would make the case that you've built a website that suggests you hope everyone else in the world would answer Yes. I just popped Science Fiction Novels into my favorite search engine. Atop the search engine results: An article from a major publication on 15 great science fiction novels A bunch of Top 100 lists from an Australian site featuring reviews A list of 20 science fiction novels guaranteed to change my life from a blog that seems to have 20-30 posts per day. A wikipedia list of science fiction novels Scifi.com's book reviews page Are you noticing what I'm noticing? The search engine isn't featuring lone authors. They're featuring the kind of resources where you can find out about many DIFFERENT scifi novels. And so they should. When you're looking for your next book, you're looking to satisfy certain criteria. You're looking to have a choice. You want a menu from which you can choose what looks good. If you were looking to have a book randomly assigned to you, you'd be better off with a blindfold and a dartboard. That search I did brought back 715,000 results. What page do you think you're on? 14,000 maybe? How often have you clicked that deep into search results? But before you feel bad, think about this... On your blog, you have a list of your 10 favorite authors. Do you know how many of them showed up on that first page of search results? Zero. The search engines have gotten good enough to do what they're supposed to do They bring back information. And since they don't employ book reviewers, they send you to sites that do that job. If you want to attract search engine traffic, you need a site that offers information on more than yourself! Your Reading List page is actually a decent start. There's an author on this site with a site about the size of yours. He wrote a science fiction novel about running. He created a page on his site where he lists all the running novels he knows of. When I Google Running Novels right now, his page comes up 2nd. That's THE page on his site that attracts search engine traffic. It's not huge, but it's something. And all because he created a useful resource. You have a bigger challenge. There are a lot more lists of science fiction novels out there than of running novels. But if you refined the category, I'll bet you could create a resource. Or two. Or three. Here's an example. Maybe you'll think it's silly. Your books, I see, are set in the 25th century. What if you created a list of 25th Century Sci Fi? Buck Rogers and whatever other books are set in that time. Is it a popular search? Probably not. But it'd be fun to see how high you could rank. The Reading List you have now isn't going to rate highly as is. Its only title is The Reading List, which doesn't say much - that is, the list only says it's a list. The words Science Fiction only appear once. It's on a page that calls itself rich_text_1.html, which doesn't tell the search engines anything. Would making a few lists make your website a powerhouse? No. But it'd likely garner you more traffic than you can expect from what you have now. Real traffic would involve a reconceived site - not just a reconceived page or two - on a subject larger than yourself and your books, but... ...one that INCLUDES yourself and/or your books. In other words, a subject that brought searchers of a sort likely to be compelled by the Lorrondons. Successful websites cover a Goldilocks subject: not too wide, not too narrow. It's not much older than your site, but I think you can see why the engines would be more apt to send me traffic on the subject of Self Publishing than they would be to send you traffic on the subject of Science Fiction. Your site isn't really about Science Fiction. It's about YOUR science fiction. Make sense?
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