SEO for Authors – How to Rock
Do Authors Need to Worry About SEO Skills?
Simple answer – yes, you need to work on your SEO skills – even if you’re just an author trying to sell books. As an author SEO should be one of the top skills to learn if you plan on doing any type of self-promoting of any kind. Let’s get started on tips about SEO for Authors.
You need to get traffic to your site, no matter what you’re doing online and SEO skills are one of the most important aspects for organic traffic. If your site isn’t optimized for search engines, you’ll likely just be wasting your time, so be sure to get it right from the start.
SEO skills are also incredibly important for any kind of searchable book descriptions or author biographies, so you do want to be sure you brush up on them. The easiest way is to practice some blog posts on your website, focusing on SEO.
Afterwards, you may even want to go back and edit some of your descriptions and bio because just playing around with SEO gets the gears turning and for someone who already, most likely, has a love for words, you’re going to have some serious inspiration.
Don’t worry though, SEO for authors is easier than you think with a single, and free, WordPress plugin. You’ll be a pro at it in no time because YoastSEO is on your side and regularly updates to keep on top of new search engine rules and changes.
Even if you have a few posts and pages already, with YoastSEO, you can easily go back through them and edit them to spruce up your search engine optimization.
Sometimes I will go through old posts just to tighten up the SEO and find that old posts are getting lots of new traffic because of it. Plus, I actually really enjoy it and it helps to awaken new ideas and gets me writing.
As an author, learning SEO skills are a lot like learning grammar skills, except for websites.
You need to tell the search engines what kind of content you have on your site and what it’s about so that people can find it in the vast sea of information. It’s very easy to learn, takes practice, and becomes second nature when you regularly write posts.
When you’re writing a post, the first thing to do is decide what the main content of the post is about and draw out your keywords from it. Think of it as a pitch, but even shorter.
So, say you’re writing a post about golf instruction and you want it to be about *Making Your Best Golf Swing.
For your keywords you could choose ‘best golf swing’ and then you make sure those three words are together in the following parts of your post:
- title
- url
- headlines
- throughout the content
- image alt tags
- featured image alt tags
- post and category tags
That doesn’t mean that you should use the exact phrase over and over again randomly, but in a natural way throughout. For image alt tags, I find it’s best to change things around, such as ‘Best Golf Swing for Pros’, then another: ‘Finding Your Best Golf Swing.’
You can see how they both have the three words together while saying a different thing. This way you’ll have different phrases that will show up when people type them in the search engines, while still having keeping focus on your keywords.
For practicing advanced SEO for authors skills you can easily find out what are the most popular keywords and phrases are and use them, using free online tools such as within Google AdWords, Bing Ads, and Keyword Spy. There are loads of other keyword tools online.
I always try to make sure when I’m choosing keywords to think about what I would type in if I were looking for something. This is one of the keys to awesome SEO for your website.
And as always, the more content you post, the better you get, and the more traffic you get – you reap what you sow.
If even after using the free YoastSEO plugin, and trying to create some blog posts using keywords, and you still need help, just let me know, this is one of my services and I’m more than happy to answer any questions you might have.
*Disclosure – I know absolutely nothing about golf, so I apologize if that’s not a good example. Please don’t hold it against me, and please, no golf related questions – I won’t be much help to you.
Thanks and have an awesome day!
