I confess:
for a person who relies on people finding the content I provide online, I haven’t really paid any attention to how well
I’m found there. Surely, I’ve thought, if my name is on it and people search my
name, the content shows up. Therefore, I haven’t actually googled my pen names
to find out if they are there to be found. I know, I know, but it simply hasn’t
seemed important. Not until this week.
This is a cautionary tale.
I began to
pay attention to how people found me a while ago when I noticed that I got huge
traffic to both my blogs from one website. It seemed legitimate enough – it had
the word ‘blog’ in it – but I wasn’t born yesterday so I checked it up. And
what do you know, it turned out to be a porn site. What they thought to find on
my blog, I have no idea. However, it made me wonder how they ended up on my
blogs. I don’t provide adult content, there aren’t any risky photos – unless
you count the covers of my books, but those can only entertain for so long –
and I write mostly about books.
Was there
something wrong with my search parameters?
So, after
procrastinating for a couple of days, I finally googled one of my pen names,
Susanna Shore. I chose it because that's the name on my G+ profile so I figured
it would show up first. The results were somewhat dismaying. While the first
link led to Susanna Shore’s web page, most of the links on the first page – and
we all know only the first page counts – pointed to other Susanna Shores there
are, an academic and a singer among them. Link to my G+ profile was only on the
second page and even long dead Susanna Shores from the 17th century came before
it. Not good.
So what to
do?
There’s
plenty of information about SEO out there and most of the time you don’t even
have to look for it; I get tweets at least once a day about how to optimise my online
visibility. And I actually read most of those posts. I just haven’t done
anything about it. Now I would have to.
I started
with my G+ profile. I really believed I had it optimised already, but
apparently I had done a blotchy job. This timely shared infographic served as
a reminder of what exactly needed to be done. I didn’t follow it to a t, but I took a good look at my profile and made
some changes. Then I looked at my Twitter profile and my blogs. My Twitter
profile is made for my publishing name, Crimson House Books, so linking it with
my G+ profile isn’t very straightforward; I actually considered changing the profile name to Susanna Shore
too, but that might be confusing. That wasn’t such a great problem though. It
turned out my blogs didn’t mention my pen names anywhere. No wonder the search
engines couldn’t find them.
Another timely share taught me about Google Authorship. It allows you to link your
online content to your G+ profile – or the other way round; I haven’t really
figured it out properly yet. However, I signed to it and added a by-line to all
my blog posts. I also changed all the search parameters that were, quite
frankly, lame. The results weren’t mind-boggling, but more of my blog posts
appeared when I searched my name, with my G+ profile photo attached to them. Also,
my G+ profile moved to the first page. And as a bonus, the porn site can’t find
my blog anymore. Of course, another spam site has taken its place, but one can’t always win.
I still
have quite a bit of work to do optimising my search results. Next, I’m going to
link my G+ profile to my web page. The instructions are here; now I only have
to follow them.
I’m fairly
sure that optimising everything through Google+ will work the best for me. I
have absolutely no data to back this claim up, but – let’s face it – Google is
the biggest search engine there is and they’re bound to prefer their own
content. I think you should try it too; it’s not as much a chore as I may have
made it sound. Just open your G+ account and follow the instructions.
So, this
was my cautionary tale. If you’ve done better with your SEO efforts, I salute
you. If you’ve been lazy like me, take a look at all your online profiles.
Perhaps you could brush them up too. Here are the links again, but there is a
lot more information out there.
Do you have
tips to share for SEO? Please do. I’m sure I could do better.
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