The Poetry of Madelynn

by Tammy Tamborini
(Illinios, USA)

Site: http://begetsofautumn.tripod.com

How much traffic do you get? 20 per week

How much comes from the search engines? maybe 2

How much money and time have you put into the site? 8 hours a week

Has the site met your expectations? Yes, my fans, come to visit, and poet friends.

Tammy's page on this site: True Horror Poetry

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Hi, Tammy. You're looking for feedback on your site, but you say it has met your expectations. I guess you want it to more than meet your expectations!

Well, while I love any website (and author!) who puts our widget on her site (thank you!), I've still got some issues...

Firstly, it's a Tripod site. There are other ways to put up free sites that don't involve ugly banner ads and pop-ups. (Google the full phrase "free hosting" "no popups" "no banners" and you're sure to find some.)

Typical of Tripod sites, yours is behaving oddly in my browser. There's an image of a beautiful woman that loads and disappears, only to be replaced with some odd computer coding. (I'm running Firefox 3.6.12.)

The site takes a long time to load, too, which is probably partly a Tripod thing and partly to do with features you've loaded, like the music.

Now, you say that the reason your site has met your expectations is that your fans and poet friends come to visit. That's great! But people you already know are the easy ones to reach.

The fact that only two search engine visitors find you per week means you don't have the chance to make a lot of new fans or friends.

(This site gets about 250 search engine visitors a week. My children's books website gets about 15,000.)

What's the key to getting search engine visitors? Well, providing something that search engine visitors are looking for.

I just looked at your "meta" keywords - computer code visible not to your visitors (unless they know how to look!) but visible to the search engines. As far as I can tell, all the keywords relate to you and your work.

Here's the problem with that...

It's easy to be found by people who are looking for you. It's HARD to be found by people who don't know you but are looking for what you have to offer.

So ask yourself: What is it you're offering? If it's horror poetry, you need to signal that to the search engines. You see, they don't read very well. They don't know your poetry is horror poetry unless you tell them. Phrases like horror poetry need to occur on your page.

Does that make sense? Bringing in search engine traffic goes deeper than that, but at its most basic level, that's what it's about!

Comment back if you'd like to discuss further. (And fill out the contact form to let me know you've commented!)

- Steve