I’ve recently started posting my own piece of original young adult fantasy web fiction – Dragon Wars – online. So of course I’d like it to do well in the search engines and draw in lots of fans. Unfortunately it’s apparent that SEO for online fiction poses certain challenges which non-fiction doesn’t face. In this series of articles I’m going to apply what little I’ve picked up about SEO to the site and chronicle it and my rankings here.
This series of articles will run weekly on a Saturday. You will be able to find a list of all articles in the series on the Weblit SEO Experiment page.
The Experiment Week 2 – Beginning the On-Page Optimisation
On page optimisation is defined as what can be done on the actual pages of a website to improve your search engine rankings. For authors of Online Fiction this constitutes a unique challenge. By its very nature our content rarely contains the keywords people looking for it type in.
My solution to this problem is to try and optimise my landing page. So it is this page I will use as an example.
A landing page is a good thing for more than just SEO reasons. Maybe it’s just me but I find being dumped into the first chapter with no preamble offputting. So for Online Fiction a good landing page is like a book cover, and will entice the reader to click onwards and read the story. It’s also a place where keywords can be used naturally. The keyword phrase I am optimising this page for is “young adult fantasy”
So what are the factors in On page optimisation?
- Title tags – Title tags should contain you keywords but still human readable. Sadly many of us find this hard as we use WordPress and it uses post title as page title. I use the Headspace 2 plugin to get round this as it allows me to change the title and certain meta tags (see below). If you are using plain html then this is what goes between the <title> and </title> tags in the header. As you can see I made the title of my landing page “Dragon Wars – Online Young Adult Fantasy Serial :: Firebird Fiction” (the :: Firebird Fiction is added by WordPress and I can’t get rid of it). (Note plugins can only be used with self-hosted wordpress installations – wordpress.com sites like this blog can’t use them.)
- Meta Description Tag – Sometimes you’ll hear that Google ignores meta tags. This isn’t entirely true. Google ignores the Keywords meta tag (discussed below), but Google doesn’t ignore the Description tag. Indeed here is some good advice from Google on tuning up your description and explaining why it’s important. I used this advice in creating the description for the page. My Description tag reads: “Story: Dragon Wars, Genre: young adult fantasy, Format: online fiction, Author: Becka Sutton”. Once again I used Headspace 2 to do this.
- Meta Keywords Tag – Just to reiterate what I said above: Google ignores the keyword meta tags. And that’s straight from the horse’s mouth. It’s my understanding that Bing and the other larger players do the same. However ignoring isn’t the same as punishing, and some small search engines still use them. It doesn’t do to ignore any potential source of traffic, so I did put some keywords into them. I’d be cautious though, Google doesn’t use them, but I suspect it might punish you if you tried to stuff them anyway. Once again I used Headspace 2 for this.
- Heading Tags – Especially the H1 tag. Search Engines give extra weight to text in heading tags. They favour H1 over H2 and so on but any “H” tag will be favoured over body text. Hence the On Page Title text in <h2> as done by wordpress itself. I’ve amended this to include “young adult fantasy” as well.
- Keyword Density – Received wisdom is to try for between 2 and 5% Keyword density – with 3-4% being ideal. Here is a nice article on checking this manually and here is a good keyword density checker. Sadly I’m still working on getting my keyword density over 2%. It currently stands at about 1.5% and I’m trying to think of some way to fit more in without stuffing.
- Navigation – This one affects more than just the landing page. Both users and spiders need to be able to get round your site easily. I’ve tried to make the site as easy to navigate as possible.
- Image Alt Text – I only have the header image on the site so far. But it does have an alt tag with the “online fantasy stories” key phrase included. If you have an image always use the alt tag and try and fit a key phrase into it.
- Content – We have plenty of content (as long as we post regularly), but as I said above it rarely includes our key phrases. Conventional advice is that you should optimise one page each for one key phrase. I have therefore also done some optimisation on the site’s front page aimed at the “online fantasy stories”. I am currently considering ways of having pages targetting other keywords without going off-brand. An about online/web fiction page for example.
And the results so far?
After one week “Online fantasy stories” ranks 12 for an internal page. I expect Google will pick up on the front page as a better match soon. Not yet in top 200 for a search without the quotes. None of the other key phrases are ranking yet – but SEO is a game requiring patience and perseverance.
Firebird Fiction ranks 2 without the quotes and 1 with the quotes (though this is a vanity thing – unless my brand really takes off no one will search for firebird fiction in all likelyhood).
Dragon Wars ranks 74 without the quotes and 68 with them. Again this is mostly vanity – I will not be defeated by an old computer game or a crappy movie. However anyone searching for either of those is likely a fantasy fan, so it has a touch more chance of bringing in the web equivalent of passing foot traffic.
End Notes for Week Two
Although I have focused on the landing page (as a page where I can actually get the keywords into the content) I have been using Headspace 2 to amend the titles, meta desciption and meta keyword tags on the individual posts as well. Most on-page SEO can only be applied to landing and front pages, but what can be applied elsewhere should be.
Next week I will be thinking about off page optimisation and link building, but I’m sure I’ll be back to the on-page stuff again.
Very well written article. I am familiar with the whole SEO thing but I always completely neglect to implement the practices, especially within fiction writing posts. I can write content, but getting it promoted and properly indexed on search engines is something I suck at. Hopefully I can improve a bit more at it, this is definitely a helpful guide.
I hope it does help 🙂
It’s probably a good idea to look at the first article (about keyword research as well).
Becka
Nice article.
I am just re-starting my blog after deleting an earlier site and a long absence due to ill health. It is because of this I am looking at the whole SEO thing too. Thanks for your info.
Apparently the length of time a page or site has been in existence helps improve your page rank also.
Google rewards slackers! 🙂
You seem to have all the bases covered, but just in case “All in One SEO” is a nice WordPress plug in too.
Best wishes and good luck.
Dave Felton
I’m glad you found it useful. 🙂
“Apparently the length of time a page or site has been in existence helps improve your page rank also.
Google rewards slackers! 🙂 ”
The length of time a site has been around does help, but Google will favour a regularly updated site over one that doesn’t change.
Next week we get on to the most important (and difficult) part of the job. Linkbuilding. It’s hard requesting links when you’re a coward like me.
Wow. I hadn’t even thought of doing that! The idea of putting it in the image alt text is brilliant!
I agree that getting keywords into content is harder than it might be on a topic-related blog. I’ll have to think about that a bit.
As for links, I don’t think I have you linked on Addergoole yet. Send me a blurb & I’ll add you!
~lyn
Well using the Alt text is good practice anyway so if a blind person comes to the site it can say something about the image. The fact that search engine spiders love it too is a bonus. 🙂
I once had a page with lots of pics dragons (because it was about dragons) on it. It had alt text along the lines of “it’s a dragon”, “a brown dragon”, “a red dragon”, “yet another dragon”, “not another dragon” and so on.
Page ranked well for dragons oddly enough.
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