www.thechocolatequeen.net

by Lee Brooks
(Thompson, CT)

Site: Lee Brooks' The Chocolate Queen

Lee's page on this site.

How much traffic do you get? Not much

How much comes from the search engines? very little

How much money and time have you put into the site? 100 dollars a year

Has the site met your expectations? No.

---

Lee, firstly - as you and I have already discussed, and as you can see above - your home page has some layout problems when viewed through the 2nd most popular browser, Mozilla Firefox.

I also see a confusing navigation issue. Firstly, your menu bar atop the page is duplicative of the drop down right below it. That's a bit odd. But then there's another issue...

The Chocolate Queen is the name of your book. So when I see The Chocolate Queen listed along with

Imagine
Queen Abigail
The Prophecy
Lily and Stone

...my first inclination is to think you're writing about other books, when in fact you're elucidating the world of the book.

Also, there are no links on these pages back to the home page. (The search engine "spiders" always like to be able to find their way back to the home page. Your visitors too!) And...

I'm quite confused by the photos on the Queen Abigail page. They certainly don't look like the images on the other pages, and they don't look like images from a Fantasy novel (though the Jack Daniels bottles might constitute some people's fantasy).

I'm also confused by the photos atop the home page. They look more like family photos than images from the book. That's okay, I suppose, but it seems a little incongruous on a page devoted to the work of a pseudonymous author who isn't pretending to be anything other than pseudonymous.

If these aren't characters in the book, are they your pretend family? ;-)

Now let's take a look under the hood

I'm looking at your home page's "meta," data that the search engines see and that - for the most part - your visitors don't. (Unless, like me, they know where to look!) Meta helps the engines figure out what your site is about.

You title your home page Home. You can see this in the blue bar atop your browser. Also, this is what would comprise the blue link text if your site were ever to be found by a search engine.

So imagine showing up on a page of search results. The listings read like this:

Top 10 Fantasy Novels of All Time

The Works of J.R.R. Tolkien

Home

Order the Wizard of Oz

Do you think that "Home" is going to get clicked on? I don't.

For your Meta Keywords (the searches you hope to be found for), I see

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Those are the commas you were supposed to be putting keywords in between!

Finally, your Meta Description reads,

"Enter a brief description of your site here."

You can see how the search engines might feel you're not taking this very seriously!

All that being said...

Making these little fixes is not going to result in a big bump in traffic, because your site isn't currently offering much more than an article on you and excerpts/descriptions from the book.

I'm going to presume that what you'd like your website to be found for is the search Young Adult Fantasy Novels. After all, after your nom de plume those are the first words on your home page.

I just Googled that term and found 554,000 results. I don't suppose you expected to be in the top 10, did you? So now I'm searching Young Adult Fantasy Novel by Brooks.

Now I know your site really is NOT performing. I would expect you to come up pretty high in a search for YA Fantasy by authors named Brooks. But you're not even in the top 50 results. (And that's as far as I looked.)

Let's go back to that first search, simply Young Adult Fantasy Novels. There are some results I find interesting.

The first result is a list of the 25 best YA fantasies. The 2nd and 3rd are pages on Amazon with lists of such books, reasonably enough. It's the 4th listing I find most interesting.

www.cynthialeitichsmith.com/lit_resources/favorites/by_genre/fantasy.html

This woman is an author, proving that it IS possible for one of us to compete with the big boys on a competitive search term.

Cynthia ranks for this term...and many more. She scored for this one by creating a list of Children's and YA Fantasy Novels. After all, if you're looking for YA Fantasy Novels, you're probably looking for a list to sift through.

(All 4 of the first search results consisted of such lists.)

Now how's this for smart?...

When I'm done with this page on Cynthia's site, I navigate to the home page. (She of course has a link for me!) And lo and behold: Cynthia herself is the author of a YA Gothic Fantasy Novel entitled Tantalize.

Hmmm.

See what happened? Cynthia lured me to her site with information I actually wanted. Once there, I found out she herself writes the kind of thing I'm looking for.

Cynthia has a chance to make a sale that you don't. In fact, Cynthia has lots of chances!

I say it a lot on this site: if you want traffic, you have to create an information resource. If you want a little traffic, it can be a page. If you want a lot of traffic...

It should be a whole site. Cynthia knows that.

Not everyone wants to do the amount of writing for the web that you need to do to create an information resource. (Some really sneaky ones get others to do the writing for them. In fact, I think I see myself in the mirror!)

I have a way you can figure out if you're up to it though. This is the handbook I use to create my sites. (And my wife uses to create hers.)

It's perfect for me. I'm a bit shy and a lousy salesperson, but a decent and prolific writer. By creating sites that attract traffic, people - readers - just show up at my doorstep.

(It's August, 2008. My other site, Best Children's Books - Find, Read or Write, received 40,000+ page views last month. It comes in 1st and/or 2nd for the following searches: discount children's books, bibliotherapy, cheap children's books, children's books about alcoholism, children's books about nutrition, free children's books and many more.)

If you start reading from the handbook and your eyes glaze over before you finish the first page, it's not for you. Make some small additions and changes to your site and hope for a steady trickle of traffic.

If you start reading and find yourself exhilarated and excited about the chance to have readers start showing up at your virtual door in quantity, well...

Keep reading. It's pretty long!

I hope I gave you some things to think about.