What the heck is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Is it really a thing? Or is it just something other people have made up to occupy our thoughts with frustration and a vague unease? I mean, you hear about it. People tell you it’s important. It pops up in your Facebook feed, and in your online searches. It’s everywhere. And nowhere.
If I’d tell you that your website needs SEO, you’d say “Yes, it does.”
We’re all convinced it’s good and important and we need it.
But what exactly is SEO?
There are people who dedicate their lives and careers to analyzing and mastering Search Engine Optimization, so it isn’t something we can exhaustively cover in a short email series. My goal, instead, is to help explain what SEO is and the basics of how it works. Particularly, how it can work for you as a fiction author.
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
Search Engine Optimization is the practice of optimizing your website for search engines. Gee, that’s a helpful definition, isn’t it? Helpful, like saying the blue sky is blue.
We need a better definition.
The problem is two-fold:
1) Websites are technical. They run on code and they’re fragile. One misplaced comma in a PHP file can send your website into the white page of death. So we don’t like messing with websites. We want to leave them alone, and we want them to leave us alone too.
2) Search engines run algorithms. Also technical. Also not something we want to mess with.
With all this geekery, SEO can feel complicated. You can’t be a website expert on top of everything else you have to do, so you may pick up a few SEO tips here and there...maybe use a plugin on your website and hope that does the trick.
Yes, there really is a complicated geeky side to SEO. Experts are constantly trying to crack it. And when they start to feel like they’re making progress, Google changes The Algorithm, and the sleuthing begins again.
But for the person who’s using their website to help make a living–to sell books or soaps or ideas–you don’t have time to crack Google’s algorithm.
The good news is you don’t need to.
Understanding two fundamentals of SEO can take you a long way.
Let’s go back to our original (awful) definition and add something, so we’re covering both of those fundamentals.
"Search Engine Optimization is the practice of optimizing your website for search engines and for searchers."
Half of SEO is helping search engines find, read, and display your website content in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
The other half of SEO is the human side.
The human side of SEO is why SEO exists. Because "Google" isn’t searching for answers (or a next novel to read). People are. And those searches (queries) by people drive the whole shebang.
Google is like a reference librarian (except not as nice).
Google’s algorithm is simply how that reference librarian determines which books to pull off the shelves in response to your request for information on How to kill someone with marmalade or Common farming implements in 1850’s America. (Authors google the most interesting things...)
If you’ve written a book titled The Joys and Complexities of Marmalade in which you explain how to kill with marmalade, you want the Google Librarian to pull your book off the shelf first, so you try cozying up to her. Maybe you print the title on the spine of your book in large type so the Librarian can read it without having to grab the cheaters hanging from the chain around her neck. Maybe you find out the Librarian prefers the color blue, so you publish in a blue hardcover.
That’s optimization.
You’re helping the Librarian find, read, and share your information with searchers.
SEO experts try to learn the Librarian and the system she works within. But they also specialize in people and the requests they make.
As an author, your time is spread across enough tasks without having to master the technical aspects of SEO. Instead, you can take the knowledge you already have about your books, your readers, and your industry, and put that to work for you.
This is the human side of SEO.
This is the side you can master. Because this is about knowing people. Not just people in general, but the people who make up your audience, your readership. And I don't have to tell you that a quest to better understand your readers will not only help you reach readers with SEO, it will help you write better, market better, and manage your career better.
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