Attracting Website Traffic:
The Dialogue Continues

(This dialogue about website traffic began here.)

In addition to "meta title," the search engines look at:

• your domain name
• each page's file name (i.e. /books.html)
• meta keywords (a statement hidden in your page's code that might say, children's books, publishing house, Vermont
• meta description (another hidden statement, in plain English, summing up the page's content)
• the text on the page
• the text IN your links

ALL these things should reinforce each other. Consider the page on my site, childrens-book-awards.html

• domain name: best-childrens-books.com
• meta title: And The Winner Is... Top Children's Book Awards
• meta keywords: children's book awards, award winning children's books, child book awards, children's book prize
• meta description: "Children's book awards help you to sift through and find the best children's books for your kids. Our listing of the top children's book awards lets you choose from the best of the best!"
• the text on the page is all about a multitude of children's book awards
• the first two links read Caldecott Medal and Newbery Medal - the two most famous children's book awards.

You see, Google's job is to figure out what searchers are looking for and to give it to them. Google takes their job seriously, and they're hard to fool. So your best bet is not to try to fool them, but to give them what they want.

And to give it in such a fashion that it doesn't just please the search engines, it pleases readers. That's why the best person to write a website is...

...a writer.

Funny story. True.

In the early days of the net, search engines were easy to fool. For instance, if you wanted to attract traffic for the search term Children's Book Awards, you might write "Children's Book Awards" hundreds of times all over your page...

In white.

Invisible to readers, the not-so-smart search engines would think, "Boy! This page must REALLY be about Children's Book Awards."

So, getting back to your first question: Yes, it couldn't hurt to change your meta titles...except that yours are already reflective of your site and each page's content, for the most part. So are your page file names.

I would definitely add meta keywords and description to each of your pages, and use what you've learned here about search terms.

I would consider making existing pages "textier," and definitely make future pages so. I would also change any link that says, "click here." Instead I'd say something like, "Show me the picture books."

A word about "textier."

Few people use the internet thinking, "I need to order a children's book I've never read from a publisher I've never heard of. I hope I can give this stranger my credit card number!"

No, they come looking for information. It is ALWAYS good to think of your site as an offerer of valuable information. In offering that information freely, you might cause people to like you and trust you enough to buy your product.

Is your head spinning? I know mine would have been a few short years ago.

Have you ever considered "seizing the reins" of your website? Instead of thinking of it as a static thing that the web designer "finished," it could be clay that you yourself are capable of fine-tuning.

Let me show you a trick. Go to your own page. Right-click on a blank part of the page and choose View Source, or something similar to that.

Do a search (ctrl-F) for for more information. Just ahead of it, you'll see the word here. Don't you think you're capable of changing here to children's books?

Alternatively, have you considered building your own website from scratch? That way you can make sure it's "optimized" to attract traffic from the start.

There are ways to create "texty" websites where you don't have to learn code. That's basically what I do. I write - the same way I do for other media - and let the software do the coding. You wouldn't believe how freeing it is.

(And how nice to "publish" when I say it's ready, not when some editor does!)

Let's make that my final question for this exchange: If you could "write" for the web, instead of "code" for the web, can you - as an accomplished writer - think of any contexts when you might prefer to publish to the web than to publish to print media?

Beginning of dialogue.

Best Children's Books home.