Sorry this is late this week. My shoulder is playing up, and I wasn’t sure what to write at first.
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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 3 – Link Building
Or not as the case may be.
Don’t get me wrong Link Building is important. It is quite possibly the most important part of SEO, I’m just not very good at it. So I haven’t really started yet, because I’m still trying to work up the courage to contact people and ask for a link.
Why is link building important? Links are the glue of the web, it’s not just that a link is taken as a vote for the site by the search engines, but people follow them too. A good quality link can drive traffic to your site directly as well as. This is just as important is not more so.
But like I said I haven’t done much yet. Still I haven’y been entirely idle.
What I have been doing is submitting to directories – not just web fiction directories (though mostly) but normal directories which have a section for online fiction. This includes a submission to the appropriate dmoz category but it’s dmoz. I’m not holding my breath, dmoz is notoriously slow and the category doesn’t have an editor (though the parent category does). Not many people really use dmoz to find stuff, but it’s still good for link juice.
I’ve also been adding my link to my forum signature on forums where it isn’t considered spammy and been making relevant comments on blogs and similar. Oh and when link building don’t worry about follow and no follow links. Consensus is Google likes a mixture because if you only have follow links it doesn’t look natural. Google likes natural.
In a hint of desperation I’ve also put a link to me plea in the sidebar of the site.
But in all honesty this isn’t my forte. If I’m to be successful it’s something I’ve got to do, but I’m still learning.
So instead let me link you to an awesome article Link Building: The Key to Exploding Visibility. It’s aimed at small businesses not writers, but some of the advice stands for anyone and the rest is adaptable.
I’ll try and have a more comprehensive post about link building next week.
Position Update:
“Online Fantasy Stories” is showing second with the quotes (and the blog is showing 7th) and 35th without them. Not bad for three weeks, but it is a very uncompetative search term.
“Firebird Fiction” shows first with the quotes (with my twitter and blog coming in behind them) and 2nd without them (twitter and blog again make the top ten). And amazingly I’ve actually had someone arrive on the site after searching for firebird fiction!
“Dragon Wars” 59 with the quotes, and 60 without them. Going in the right direction. 🙂
“Young Adult Fantasy” Not yet in top 100.
“Fantasy Stories” Not yet in top 100.
“Online Fiction” Not yet in top 100.
Next week I may not be able to post as I have a guest, but I’ll try.
Cheers Becky. Thanks for the link! Keep posting and keep linking! 🙂
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by shutsumon: It’s a day late but here’s week 3 of the great weblit seo experiment http://bit.ly/b9qtnY it’s kind of lame…
Great post! Thx for the tips!
Good luck with your SEO. In particular, “fantasy stories” strikes me as wildly competitive.
“Young Adult Fantasy…” I feel that the people most likely to use that query are librarians and teachers. Do you get a lot of young readers? What sort of SEO tips would you recommend for reaching them?
As for myself, I’m fighting for my superhero writing advice website to place on search terms like how to write superhero stories (#1 on Google), superhero novels (#4), how to write comic books (#25), superhero writing (#1), comic book writing advice (#2), and the like. I think it’s much easier for non-fiction writers than fiction authors.
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I’ll put up a link on my blog…once I figure out how to 😀