Lizzy Ford's Blog, page 68

SEO firms charge a lot of money to do competitive analysis for your keyword phrases, we're going to talk about how you can do a lot of this yourself for free. In our post and video a few weeks ago we talked about using Google keywords to find out how often the keywords you're interested in are searched in Google. So if you've watched that then you've probably already brainstormed a list of keywords and taken a few minutes to type them into Google keywords tool to see how much search traffic each of the terms get. This step alone puts you well above most website owners when it comes to knowing which terms to optimize your website for.

Once you've got your terms and how much traffic they get, the next step is to find out how much competition there is for each of those terms. If you know how much volume to expect for each of the terms AND how hard it will be to get a good ranking for each of the terms you can make informed decisions about how to optimize your site. This will give you an advantage over almost all of the other website owners out there as most don't do any form of competitive analysis at all.

If you've been reading my articles you know that if you're trying to optimize a page for a term you really need to use that term in the title of that web page. Not only can you use this to optimize you're own page, but you can use it to gauge the competition! How? By using a tiny trick in Google.

As I write this if I type "read free romance novels" into Google I see that there are over 4.5 million results for that term. That doesn't help me much as I don't want to know how many results there are, I want to know how many people are optimizing for that term. They are going to be my competition. So if I go back to Google and type in "allintitle: read free romance novels" I see there are 408 results. What did I just do? By using the allintitle: switch in Google I'm telling Google to only show me pages where the term "read free romance novels" is in the title of my page. With this info for each of my terms I can now figure out where to focus my efforts to get the best results. Is this everything that a SEO firm performing competitive analysis would do? Probably not, but it's quick, easy, free and not many people do it. Below is a YouTube video I just made where I demonstrate this trick and talk about how to use it. As always, please feel free to post any questions or comments.

Lizzy Ford has several free paranormal romance novels and young adult romance novels which you can download and read for free on your Kindle, Nook, iPad, eReader, Kobo or other device.

Katie's Hope and Katie's Hellion are the first two books in the Rhyn Trilogy and both have 4.5 out of 5 stars on smashwords.com. The Rhyn trilogy has been a huge hit with paranormal romance fans and is suitable for young adults.

Katie thinks she's going crazy when a baby immortal and death's personal assistant appear at her doorstep. She's drawn into a world filled with immortals like Rhyn, an outcast half-breed who claims her as his mate in a show of defiance to his brothers. Rhyn rescues her from Hell and discovers his little human has a gift that'll help his brothers protect the immortal and mortal worlds.

To read free romance novel Katie's Hellion click here.

Katie's hope is the thrilling sequel to Katie's Hellion and you can read it for free here.

If you're looking to read other free romance novels you can see other Lizzy Ford novels

click here for free download

The sequel to Lizzy Ford's smash hit "Katie's Hellion" has finally arrived and is available for free download for your Kindle, Nook, iPad, Kobo or eReader.

Three weeks after leaving Rhyn, Katie learns the Immortals have no intention of letting her go despite her deal with their leader. Rhyn discovers he can only protect her if he accepts his place among the Immortals. However, doing so may cost him the only thing that matters. Meanwhile, demons are closing in, and Death orders Katie killed. Death's assassin and the demons pursue them, and Katie will have to choose between Death or Hell to save Rhyn from both.

The second book in the Rhyn trilogy also includes exclusive excerpt from rising indie star Shéa MacLeod's debut novel, Kiss of Darkness.

In posts earlier this month we talked about how to pick good keywords for your site and using landing pages to help you get "long tail" traffic from search engines. Today I'm going to write about how to optimize your landing page for the keywords you choose.

In order to demonstrate the concept I just created a page a few minutes ago to target people looking for "free online romance reads". This isn't a popular term with only 140 searches each month in the U.S. according to Google but I picked it because our site isn't currently ranked in the top 100 for it so it will be a perfect test case.

If you haven't already, click on the page and check it out. The first thing to look at is the URL itself. I've got the keyword phrase "free online romance reads" in the name. That's an important piece. You should also notice I use the term in the title of the page "Free Online Romance Reads by Lizzy Ford", the main heading or "h1″ tag on the page is also my keyword phrase. None of these are 100% must haves but they all help.

Now for the text itself. The first sentence has the phrase in it, but then I only get a chance to sneak it in one more time in the text. Is that enough? I think so because the page is short. A good general rule of thumb on longer articles is to have your keywords be about 5% of your total content. My page is 318 words long and 8 them are keywords for a total of about 2.5%. Should I sneak the phrase in another time? Nah, it's fine. I think a third use of would appear unnatural and I've already used it in the page name, page title and header.

It really can be a fine line sometimes between using your keyword enough to get a good ranking in Google, and using it too much and getting penalized for "spamming" your keywords. Did I pull it off? We'll find out shortly. As I said earlier our site currently isn't ranked in the top 100 results of Google for that term. The term isn't very popular so if we want to rank for it and are willing to put in the effort we should be able to. If in a week or two we're still not ranked for "Free Online Romance Reads" then it's back to the drawing board. If I wake up in two day's and we're on the front page of Google for them, then mission accomplished and you got a front row seat for the creation of a landing page that is pulling traffic from Google to our site.

Below are a few free online romance reads by Lizzy Ford. All of these books are full length novels, professionally edited, suitable for young adults and 100% free! They are available to download to your Kindle, Nook, Kobo, eReader or iPad.

Full Length fantasy romance novel Kiera's Moon is available for free download.

Kiera's Moon has an average rating of 4.75 stars on smashwords.com

"Amazing book. I could not stop reading it, I kept on reading through the early morning hours until I had to go bed. This is a must read and absolutely loved it!! More of these characters please??"

"Loved the book. This is the first book that i have read from the author and i found it very interesting. A well written book. It is unlike the usual romance novels you find. The story line is engaging and intelligent. A nice love story for a rainy day.. must read for romance lovers."

Lizzy Ford's full length paranormal free romance novel Katie's Hellion is available for free download for your Kindle, Ipad, Nook, Kobo or eReader.

Katie's Hellion is Lizzy's most popular book to date with tens of thousands of free downloads and an average rating of 4.5 stars at smashwords.com. If you're looking for a great free online romance read this is a great place to start.

"Absolutely LOVED this book~! This wait for the second book might kill me, but definitely worth it."

"I absolutely loved this book. From the first word to the last I was totally captivated. The characters were outstanding. Even though the action was fast paced and non stop, it was very well written and easy to follow. I can't wait for the next in this series."

"I absolutely loved this book. The world the author has created is captivating, sucking the reader in and taking you along for a fantastic ride. Great job and I'm looking forward to more!"

I apologize for the delay on this one, and appreciate everyone's patience! My husband and I are moving this weekend. After packing our stuff, the driver for the movers quit, so we're not sure at this point where our household goods are. They're telling us late next week for delivery … as soon as we have everything back, we'll upload Katie's Hope and Damian's Oracle (revised.) Should be by Friday, hopefully sooner. (We're moving to Tucson, Arizona! Woohoo!)

Thanks to all our fans and visitors for being a part of Lizzyland and dropping by to check out our site! Because of the support we've received, we are now rated by Alexa as one of the 500,000 most popular websites worldwide. Yay!

We've been doing quite a few posts about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) lately. SEO isn't hard the same way calculus is hard, but it can be very time consuming and is constantly changing.

You can ignore it all together, but know you probably won't get a lot of traffic from Google. You can pay someone to do it for you. Most of the providers you find cheap aren't very good and the good ones are rarely cheap. The going rate for a firm to look at your site and make recommendations is often $750 to $1000+. That's for a one time recommendation! To have them monitor and make ongoing recommendations or to actually implement to recommended changes would likely make you faint.

The option most of us will choose is to do it ourselves. The odds are you're not a web developer and you don't have 20 hours a week to devout to SEO, so you need focus on things that are easy and things that give a big return. We're going to look at Julia Crane's site again for some recommendations that go from really easy, to really painful. Thanks again to Julia for letting us use her as our SEO guinea pig!! Her Alexa ranking has already gone from around 13 million to under 6 million. Go Julia Go!

The first recommendation is an easy one: change up those page titles. The title on Julia's main page is "Julia Crane, Young Adult Author" is PERFECT. The title should ideally contain the terms you're hoping people will use to find you, and her title has her name and what she is. What could be optimized is the fact that her site currently uses the same title on every page. Ask yourself what you think will draw people to the page and try to incorporate that phrase into the title. Most search engines display 60 characters to try to keep that in mind.

The next suggestion is just as easy. Add a link page!!!! Since day one the biggest component to Google's algorithm is how many quality links your site has to it. By adding a link page, you can start the oldest and most revered SEO practice of them all, link building. Our next SEO related article will talk more about link building but basically you want to go to other websites in your genre and offer to put their link on your site if they put your link on theirs. If lots of popular sites in the eBook industry link to your site, Google will assign your site a lot of authority and you will rise in their results pages.

The last idea for this article is a painful one. This is less a suggestion for her and more of a warning for those of you getting started. Don't split up your efforts!! Let me explain what I mean.

The more quality content you post to your site, the more people Google will send to your site. The main reason this happens is Google thinks you're a good site if you're constantly producing good content. The secondary reason is that the more content you have on your site, the more phrases there are for people to hit on while searching. Our site is getting over 100 visitors from Google each day. What's sending them here? EVERYTHING. So far today our site has gotten 98 visits from Google, on 59 different terms! They're mostly variations on Lizzy Ford and her book names but the more you say, the more people will find you. This doesn't mean you just post whatever, it has to be original and of high quality. That takes a lot of time to do.

If you have a website and a SEPARATE blog, you're hurting yourself in the long run. It isn't a death blow and I'm sure there are sites who have overcome it but it does make for a tougher haul.

Every time you make a good post on your site, your authority with Google goes up. When you make a good post on your blog, it helps the blog but doesn't really do much for a separate site. This is why WordPress and Joomla are so popular. They let you have your site while offering full blogging functionality. If your starting off should you do your blogging on your own site, YES!!! Should Julia toss the blog and merge the blog onto her site? I couldn't make that recommendation. If she was running a WordPress site, I would recommend that she bite the bullet and merge but she's running a pure HTML site and it's really nice looking. The effort required to convert her site to WordPress wouldn't be trivial.

As I said earlier, this does not mean that her site will never do well. It can and it will, she will just have to work twice as hard to keep producing content on both sites.

As always, feel free to post any questions or comments. If you're interested in having a SEO evaluation post like this done on your site, please feel free to use the contact us form and let me know.

Looking for a good free romance novel? You need look no further! Lizzy Ford has several free full length romance novels which have reached as high as #2 on the Amazon charts! There are several free novels to choose from and you can download them for free to your Kindle, iPad, Nook, Kobo or eReader.

Fantasy romance novel Kiera's Moon is available for free download.

Kiera's Moon was recently #2 on the Amazon UK Charts for free eBooks.

When starving artist Kiera wakes up on board a spaceship, she panics. Her best friend has dragged her across the universe to help her find a man and a life, only the man she ends up unwittingly hooking up with is a battle-hardened warrior prince living in exile.

Calculating, cautious A'Ran wants nothing more than to reclaim his planet. He needs Kiera as his lifemate to heal his planet and his war weary people. He's not prepared to be a lifemate himself, and discovers almost too late what he risks losing if he can't learn to be more than a warrior.

Lizzy Ford's full length paranormal free romance novel Katie's Hellion is available for free download for your Kindle, Ipad, Nook, Kobo or eReader.

"Katie's Hellion" has received rave reviews from across the world and is very popular with young adult fans and paranormal romance readers.

Katie's having the worst day ever: she's been dragged down to the police station for abandoning her son, a cute kid with big brown eyes. Only Katie doesn't have a son. She's never seen the five year old boy in her life, despite the insistence of the police, her doctor, even her own sister. She thinks she's gone completely crazy until the five year old living in her house tells her his secret: he's a baby immortal, and his guardians were supposed to wipe her mind so she'd forget he didn't belong to her and raise him as hers. But Katie is immune to the power of immortals, and they don't react well to this discovery. Katie winds up in Hell, where she meets Rhyn, who recognizes her as an immortal's mate – and his key out of Hell.

Rhyn is a misunderstood immortal, the youngest of the seven Ancients, sentenced to Hell after accidentally almost destroying the world. Katie's immunity to immortals creates an opportunity for them to escape Hell, so he snatches her and flees. At first, Katie despises the man who treats her like a portable food source, until she finds out he's the only one willing and able to protect her from the dangers of the immortal world. Rhyn discovers that his little human has heart. With horror, he discovers she's not destined to be any immortal's mate- she's destined to be his mate. He has no idea how to care for someone else let alone control his power, but he must learn, as his little human is endangered by both good and bad immortals determined to use her to their advantage.

Sue is the lastest author I interviewed as part of the IWU Neverending Blog Tour, and I was thrilled to learn she finds her inspiration in dreams!  A fellow dreamer!  Sue's debut novel, Wizard of Time (Chasing History), is a creative, engaging tale about three friends who are faced with the ultimate challenge: returning pieces of history that have been stolen by bad people who want to change the world. 

Sue's novel: Wizard of Time (Chasing History), is availabe from Amazon for .99.

Tell me what readers should know about Sue Owen, the woman behind the Wizard.

I am exactly as I seem… no surprises here!

What inspires you to write?

Most of my inspiration comes from dreams.

If you had a perfect writing outfit, what would it be? 

Something comfy; I hate being tied down. 

 How do you define success as a writer?

I'd like people to recognize my books as something they read once and loved or have to reads because they know they will be great.

Does your family read your books?

Depends on the book but one of my daughters is my editor so she has no choice.

What's the #1 piece of advice you'd like to give other indie authors?

Hang in there … this is NOT an overnight success business.

What's the hardest part of writing a novel, in your opinion?

Getting the time to sit down and write.

Your novel, Wizard of Time (Chasing History), is about three people sent on an adventure by The Wizard to find artifacts that have been stolen.  This is an awesome storyline – it's creative, fun, and will no doubt give you tons of different ways to develop this series.  What inspired the idea of someone stealing history?

It started with a dream about a young man who felt he had to have a quest in order to consider himself a man.  From that came thinking about what kind of quest he had to be on; then what was the purpose.  Somewhere in there I linked King Arthur's time period with the quest and the items became a sword, a mirror and a staff. 

I believe you mentioned this is book one in a series.  Care to share your plans (or approximate release schedule) for the second book or the series?

The second book is with my editors and has a release date of October 15th.  I expect I'll meet that no problems.  The third book has yet to be written.  Because of the first two most of it has been written to fill in the deliberate holes in the first two but it will have its own special surprises.  I'm looking for a spring 2012 release for that one.

What's the story's main message?

I want people to think about their actions.  If you do something today what will happen tomorrow?  The bigger picture has to do with global warming and that whole weather changing thing.  We are bringing about our own destruction and no one seems to notice.

Who is/are the main characters?

The first book is told from Josh's point of view.  He's actually the Guide in the first book.  His role changes, however, later.  The Wizard of Time is the old wizard that brings the three together.  The second book is written from Meri's standpoint and the third from Digger's. 

Which character do you admire from this book?

In the first book, Josh is the hero in my mind.  He keeps them heading the right way and thinks of the idea to return the sword.  I very much enjoyed taking the rather selfish, street smart kid that starts out this story and turning him into a decisive man who cares about others.  I'm proud of who he becomes.

Which character surprised you when you wrote him/her?

They all kind of have their own little surprises.  I didn't think Josh would come so far in this book.  I expected to have to nurse him a bit in the second book but he fully came into his own.  Ask me that question when I'm done writing the third book.

If you could be stranded on a desert island with one of your characters from this novel, which one and why?

Which one would you definitely NOT want to be stranded with and why?

Probably Meri.  She and I are WAY too much alike.  I think we'd end up on each others' nerves.

What did you learn about yourself when you wrote this book?

This book opened up a whole new world for me.  I knew I wanted to write but I didn't think I had it in me.  I won't tell you my age but I have 10 grand kids and I never in a million years thought I could start a new career at my age let alone one that I love so much. 

What other projects do you have planned?

I have a kids book that is being illustrated as we speak.  I hope to release it end of August.  I have two romance stories I'm working on… one intending to be a short story.  I have a comedy, a detective, another kids book and the third of Chasing History I've started.

Where can we find your book?

Twitter

While hanging out with some friends last night one of them mentioned the name of a well established local business. I pulled out my iPhone and googled the business name and the city. What showed up as the site description? "Joomla! – the dynamic portal engine and content management system." Wow. Whoever made their website didn't bother to change that default description.

I clicked on the link to bring up the site. The site came up and I could see a beautiful border but nothing else. When I got home my suspicions were confirmed, the entire site was done with movies and pretty pictures and no actual text on the front page at all. So what this business has is a very fancy looking website that has no description in Google whatsoever and isn't viewable from a large percentage of the mobile devices out there. Basically everything that a business could do wrong with it's website was done wrong. I have no idea how much business they've lost as a result, I'm just happy I wasn't involved with it.

This post isn't just a rant though, it reminded me of a very simple concept I've been wanting to write about: while Google controls where your page will appear in it's rankings, you have full control over your site's description in those search results. Let's take a look at indie author Julia Crane's website again.

Google show's her main page description as : "Julia Crane, Young Adult Author. Home Page About Julia Crane Books Blog Contact … Enter the magical world of Julia Crane, the author of the fantasy, …"

That is far, far, FAR better then the generic joomla description that the first site had. This description tells me she's a young adult author and this is her site. Not too shabby. where did this description come from? From the text on her site. If you don't tell Google what to say about your site, it grabs the first text off of the page and uses that. While that's better then leaving it blank, it's usually not ideal. The first part of her description includes "Home Page About Julia Crane Books blog Contact" beacuse that is what text is there.

Our websites description on Google reads:

"Home of best selling author Lizzy Ford. Lizzy writes young adult paranormal romance and has written such hits as Damian's Oracle and Katie's Hellion (The …"

Is that text anywhere on the page? Nope. I use a WordPress plugin called "All in one SEO" that let's me set the title and description of each page, that way I can override the default "grab the first text" option with something which is hopefully more successful at luring people from Google to our site. Other blogs have similar plugins and if your site is just straight HTML like Julia's, it's an easy fix as well. The plugin adds the following code to the head section of my HTML:

The first meta tag "description" obviously set's my desired description for that page, which Google respects. The second meta tag"keywords" lets me inject a few phrases I think my site is about. Years ago keyword metatags were extremely important. They aren't important any more but they don't hurt anything so I still use them.

What's really cool about working with Julia's page is that all the hard work was done, and it was done extremely well. She has a beautiful site with a beautiful movie trailer on the front page. The SEO half of the equation really is the easier half, it can just be time consuming.

My first two recommendations SEO wise would be to write your own page descriptions, and to give Google a little more text to work with. Beautiful sites like hers don't get the credit they deserve in Google's rankings because Google doesn't see the pretty pictures and the well done movie, it only see's text and there's hardly any of that on the site. Very easy problem to fix, and it doesn't have to be fixed today. Give it some thought, look around at other sites for inspiration and write out what you would like to say to your fans.