ANWA Presentation: Optimizing Your Author Website for Google and Social Media

To really optimize your author website, you need to do more than just SEO: you need to make your website content stimulating, searchable, sharable, and savable. Additionally, ideas are given for unpublished authors on how to start a website and what to blog about. This presentation was given at the ANWA Time Out For Writer’s Conference on September 16, 2016.

List of Ideas for Published and Unpublished Authors to Blog About:

±Short stories

±Poetry

±Comics

±Art

±Photo a Day

±Personal Writing Process

±Personal Inspiration

±Writers you admire

±Book reviews

±Movie reviews

±Something related to craft you’ve gone searching for and not found  a good answer

±Life updates

±Travel/Events

±Your non-writing hobby

±Where you live (i.e. parks/ historic sites/history etc.)

±Subjects your characters care about

±Top 10 Lists

±Your Genre

±Subjects your characters care about

±Resources for Readers (i.e. genre compilation lists)

±How to Guides

±Soundtracks to your book/life

±Cooking/Crafts

±Kids/Family/Church

±Rhetorical treatises on things you care about

±Satire

±Current events

±Dream cast the characters in your stories

±Your favorite first lines from books in your genre

±Create a Buzzfeed style quiz about something you care about

±Season/month/holiday theme

±Languages and foreign lands

±Grammar misused “in the wild”

±Favorite authors

±Creative history of a subject you care about

±Things you collect

±Quotes to inspire

±Book trailer

±Fan book trailers or art

±Concerts, writing conferences, and special events

±Word history/analysis

Useful Links

Note: I didn’t have time to actually turn these into hyperlinks yet, but that will happen ASAP.

The platform I use for my website: WordPress

Email subscription service (free up to 1000 subscribers): MailChimp

Image Editing and Creation: Canva

Keyword Research: Keywordtool.io

More Keyword Research: do a Google search

WordPress SEO Plugin: Yoast SEO

Advanced Keyword Research: kwfinder.com and semrush.com

Creative Commons searches–make sure you perform an advanced search so it’s an image you have rights to use. If it requires attribution, then attribute it in your post: Flickr, Google, Bing, Google, Wikimedia Commons

Free stock photos (no attribution required): Pexels

Learn to write good titles and blog posts: Buzzfeed

Plugins I Use on My Website:

Akismet (spam filter)

All in One Favicon

Easy Forms for MailChimp by YIKES

Exclude Pages from Navigation

Special Recent Posts Free Edition

Yoast SEO

Coming soon… other good plugins (will update this weekend)