This is The Write Now podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 59: SEO For Writers.

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps aspiring writers and all writers to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I’m your host, Sarah Werner. And I’m going to try something a little bit different today. And it might work and it might not work, but I’m going to try it. Because that’s what we’re all about here at the Write Now podcast is trying new things.

A while ago, I posted an episode, episode number 33 that was called do I need a website? And it talked about sort of the more technical side of things that you may want to do personal branding wise as a writer. So if you haven’t listened to episode 33 yet, I would encourage you to do that because this is a followup to that episode. Because we’re going to talk about how to use your website as a writer to improve your SEO.

Now I know probably most of you are asking what even is SEO? Maybe you’ve heard the term before. Maybe you’ve seen it before. Maybe you’re like, “Oh hey, someone told me I need to do SEO in order to really get my name out there. But I have no idea what that is.” And that’s okay because we’re going to talk about that.

So SEO stands for search engine optimization. And a search engine is something like Google, or Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo, or Bing, or whatever it is that you use to find things on the internet. It’s an engine that helps you search for things. And when we talk about search engine optimization, we’re not talking about optimizing the search engines themselves. Because we probably don’t have access to Google’s algorithm or to Bing, unless you work for Google or Bing. In which case, get in touch with me because I wanted to talk with you.

Instead, when we talk about search engine optimization, what we’re talking about is making our websites optimized for search engines. Basically what I’m saying is you can help search engines to what’s called crawl or index your site, AKA understand your site so that when people use search engines to search for something that might be related to your website, your website comes up.

So for example, I’ll start off with an easy one. When I go to Google, and I’m just going to use Google as the example for the rest of this episode so I don’t always have to say Google, Bing, and Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo, and Ask Jeeves, or whatever you’re using. When I go out to Google and I been Sarah Ray Werner, which is my name, I want my websites to come up. I want sarahwerner.com to come up. I don’t want something that I don’t own to come up.

I can increase my chances of my website coming up by using SEO. And maybe right now you’re thinking, “Okay. So what? This is not important to me as a writer.” But it is. Once you’ve put all that time and energy into building your website, you’re going to want to make sure people can find it. And not just based on typing in your name. Say for instance, that you have a podcast about writing. When people go to Google and they type in podcasts for writers or writing podcasts, I want my website to come up because I want more people to listen to and be inspired by my show. And I can use SEO to make sure that my website is in a good healthy place for search engines to deliver it to people who are searching. Basically, search engine optimization, SEO is a collection of tips and tricks really that will help your website to show up online or to show up higher in the search results.

So maybe when we type in podcasts casts for writers, a lot of other podcasts come up first. So maybe the first one is Grammar Girl, and maybe another one is Darken the Page by Dave Booda. Maybe mine’s pretty far down on the list. And the further down on the list of search results you are, the less likely people will be to click on your site. And we can use SEO to sort of bump ourselves up in the listings. I can’t promise you that you’ll end up in the number one spot, but we can get you higher than you already are.

So why do I need SEO as a writer? Well, a couple of reasons. First of all, it is a facet of digital marketing. And I have a marketing background. So I’m really excited to share some of this with you for free here on my show. So it’s a facet of digital marketing that you can use. And the benefits of this are it’s free. So it’s one aspect of digital marketing that you don’t have to pay for. It also helps people find your site and increases traffic to your site. So if you’re a blogger and you’re like, “Why do I only have two people visiting my website?” Well, SEO can maybe help bring more visitors to your blog. SEO also helps search engines to index your site, which I mentioned earlier. Which means that Google better understands your website. Which means that Google will know when to serve it up appropriately to people who are searching for terms related to what you talk about on your website.

SEO can also help establish your expertise or your brand. So if someone is searching for writing podcasts and mine is the one that comes up first, well then you’re going to say, “This person must be the expert. This must be the best writing podcast because it comes up first when I search for writing podcasts or podcasts for writers.” Incidentally, I don’t think mine is the first one that comes up. So that’s sort of proof that even if you know what you’re doing, you won’t necessarily end up in that number one spot. Because search engine algorithms, which are these sort of codes and processes through which search engines rank and order websites, are very complex. So you could be doing 10 things right. But there’s thousands of elements that affect your ranking because the algorithm is so complex. I really hope this is making sense. I was a little bit reluctant to record this episode because I’m like, “Oh my gosh, either people are going to find this super helpful, or they’re going to run away screaming because techno babble.” So let me know your thoughts at the end of this episode. Let me know if it’s helpful or not.

So whether you’re a novel writer, a blogger, a writing coach, a writing podcaster, a poet, a memoirist, whatever kind of writing you do, SEO can help your website get found. Luckily, over the past decade or so, search engines like Google have gotten smarter and smarter, and their algorithms have become more and more sophisticated. So it used to be you could sort of trick the search engines into thinking your website was amazing by doing practices such as keyword stuffing and other little dirty tricks. But since search engines have gotten smarter, they’re actually acting more human, which is maybe a little scary. I gave a talk a couple of years ago with a good friend of mine named Chris Prendergast. And the talk was called Skynet SEO. And it was all about how Google’s algorithm is becoming more and more human. It’s fascinating stuff.

But essentially what this means is that there’s no longer a huge divide in what’s good for humans and what’s good for bots, what’s good for the spiders that crawl your website and report back to the search engine. So basically, what’s best for your users or your readers at the end of the day is going to be what’s best for your website and what’s best for SEO. So I really want to hammer home that point.

So are you ready to jump into some tips and tricks? It’s kind of funny me asking that as a podcaster, because all I hear in response is resounding silence. So I’m going to take your silence as a resounding yes and continue on again. If you find yourself lost, confused, etc., you can head out to sarahwerner.com. That’s S-A-R-A-H-W-E-R-N-E-R.com. And look at the show notes for today’s episode, episode number 59. And you should be able to see sort of laid out a more orderly explanation of what the heck I’m talking about. So it might help you to reference the show notes for this episode. Or hey, maybe you’re catching them perfectly, or maybe you are already doing SEO professionally. In which case you can probably skip this episode. So whatever your expertise, I hope that you are taking something away from today. So let’s go ahead and dive into our tips and tricks.

What we’re going to cover is a couple thing. We’re going to cover having indexable content. And we’ll talk about what that means in just a second. We’re going to talk about having a tidy information architecture. And again, we’ll talk about what that means in a second. And we’ll also talk about something called good on page SEO, which basically is the stuff that shows up on each page of your website. And we’ll dig into that in a little bit as well. So we’re going to cover those three areas today.

This is not going to be a comprehensive list of everything ever that had to do with SEO in the history of mankind. Because again, there’s thousands of elements that go into Google’s algorithm and other search engine algorithms. But, these are things that you can do with your website or that your developer or the person who made your website can do to help improve your SEO in a significant way.

We’re going to start with indexable content. So when content is indexable, when your website is indexable, what that means is that Google can understand, the little bot that’s crawling your website can understand what’s on your website . Because the thing is search engines and the little spiders that crawl your website. And I’m talking about little digital spiders, not real spiders. They don’t see your website in the same way that we do. They don’t see all the beautiful design, and the frills, and the imagery, and the really gorgeous gradient that you’ve put over your photograph. What they see is you know how sometimes when you load a website and it doesn’t load right, you see a white background and a bunch of blue and black text, and it’s kind of ugly? That’s what the bots see. And there’s actually a website that you can plug in your website address into, and it can show you what a bot like Google sees when it crawls your website. And I’ll share that with you in just a little bit.

So there’s three things that you can do to make your website more indexable, more visible, more viewable and understandable for a bot. And that is number one, make sure you include alt text for images. So some of you may have a Squarespace or a WordPress website, and you’ve uploaded photos to it before. And sometimes there’s a little space where you can fill in something called alt text A-L-T text. Now, since Google can’t see images, if you leave that alt text space blank, Google’s just going to read the name of your website, maybe the header of your website, and then see something called IMG 34591287, because that’s how a lot of us name our images. And Google’s going to be like, “Okay, this must be an image of some kind. I’m not really sure what it is.” And go past it. But if you fill in the place where it says alt text for each image, then Google will understand what your image is. So what you would type into that alt text space would be image of girl laughing and reading a book or book cover for whatever the name of your book is called.

The second thing you’re going to want to do is to make sure that you don’t have any Flash or Java plugins on your site. These are things that maybe add animation, or make the site look really cool, or have it do something kind of funky and different. And while this is really cool looking and can help set your website apart, it’s not great for SEO. And it’s not great for people who are using a screen reader to access your website. So people who don’t see very well. So make sure that there are no Flash or Java plugins on your site. And if you’re not 100% sure what that means, ask the person who put your website together. They will know.

Finally, if your website features any video or audio components. So if you have maybe a book trailer, if you have a video of you as the author speaking about your book. If you have podcast files that are available, you’re going to want to make sure that you have transcripts available for those files. So people who are maybe hard of hearing can still enjoy your content by reading it instead of necessarily needing to listen to it. This is good for SEO because as weird as it seems to us, Google cannot understand audio or video. It’s not smart enough yet where it can parse what’s going on in those files. It needs written out text. So video subtitles or transcripts will help with that as will audio transcripts. They’ll give Google an idea of what exactly is on your page and what you’re talking about so that Google can index that and deliver it to users if that’s what they’re searching for.

As you can see, all three of these aspects, so using all texts for images, making sure there’s no Flash or Java plugins on your sites, and making sure that you have video and audio transcripts typed out. All three of these are not only good for SEO, but they’re also good for accessibility. So maybe for users who are hearing impaired or sight impaired, or maybe have some other accessibility issues with using your website. So really, not only does this make your website more crawlable, it also makes your website more accessible to more people.

There’s a stat that I like to use when I’m talking about website accessibility. And that is that 30% of people who come to your website are facing an accessibility issue. That is one third of all the people in the world have maybe colorblindness, or maybe they’re hearing impaired, or there’s something else that they’re not able to use your website in the way that you assume they can use it. So it’s really, really important to take these into consideration for people, for the users of your website in addition to the bots that will be crawling it.

So those are the three points that I wanted to cover about indexable content. The next thing I want to talk about is what I refer to as tidy information architecture. When I say information architecture, people immediately freak out and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, what are you talking about? Do I need to make information maps and map out data relationships?”

Information architecture is basically the site map for your website. It’s how the information on your website relates to each other. So you might have a home page, and that homepage might link to an about page, a my books page, and a contact page. That’s your information architecture.

And I’m simplifying this just a little bit, but I want to make sure that this is accessible for everyone. So if you want to debate with me about what information architecture is, we can do that at another time.

So before we jump into what makes for a tidy information architecture, I want to explain one term that I’m going to be using a lot. And that is URL. A URL is a uniform resource locator, otherwise known as your web address, your website’s address. So for me, my URL is sarahwerner.com. The URL for Goodreads is goodreads.com. It’s an address that points to a place online. So does that make sense? I hope that makes sense. So when I say URL, what I’m referring to is the website address for a specific page of your website. Whether that’s the home page, which would be for me sarahwerner.com. Or whether it’s another page on my website such as the contact page. And the URL for that would be sarahwerner.com/contact. Every page on your website will have its own URL, just like every house on your street has its own address. And I have a few tips and tricks here that are related to URLs that will help improve your SEO.

First and foremost, use hyphens to separate words. So if you have control over how URLs appear on your website, you’re going to want to make sure that for example, the URL for your About the Author page would be sarahwerner.com/about-the-author. Instead of sarahwerner.com/abouttheauthor all as one word. That’s specifically relating to the URL structure. You don’t need to title your page about-the-author.

Number two, shorter is often better. Just like shorter things are easier for humans to read, they’re also a little bit easier for search engines to understand. So my URL could be sarahwerner.com/about-the-author. Or it could be sarahwerner.com/about-the-amazing-author-named-sarah-werner-who-is-amazing. I’m going to stop there, but keep your URLs short, sweet, to the point.

And to that point, you want the URL of the page. So about-the-author to match the title of the page. So About the Author. And again, you don’t need to have the hyphens in the page name, just in the URL. You don’t want to have the name of the page be about the author and then have the URL be sarahwerner.com/sarah. You want those to match up.

You also want to use human language. And this may sound weird or redundant, but I’ve worked with a lot of clients who want to sound fancy. Say for instance a hospital who instead of having their maternity page be slash maternity, they want it to be some kind of fancy Latin name that nobody knows how to use their spell. So you want to make sure that you’re using real language that people will actually be searching in search engines for.

One last thing related to crawlable link structure. So how we’re structuring our URLs. And that is you don’t want any orphan pages. So what I mean by that is you want your entire website, you want all of the pages on your website to be accessible. You want people to get to your pages. So when you go to a website and you see the menu of options that you have, you want to make sure that all of your pages are represented somewhere within the menu. Whether they’re in the highest level or whether they’re sort of nested under another page, you don’t want to have any orphan pages.

Your URL should be pretty clearly mapped to where that page is located on your website. So for example, sarahwerner.com/contact lives off of the homepage. My homepage being sarahwerner.com. However, if you want to get to the page where all of my Forbes writing has been assembled, you would go to sarahwerner.com/writing/forbes, because my Forbes page lives under the writing page, which lives under the homepage. That’s reflected both in the navigation that you can see on my website as well in the URL structure.

Okay. That’s all that I have to talk about with crawlable link structure. Although I want to bring up a related point. And that is, I want to ask, do you own your own URL? Do you own a website domain? So sarahwerner.com is the URL for my website. It’s also the domain for my site. It’s a good idea that if you don’t own it already, you should probably go out and buy the URL, the domain for your website. So if your name is Susie Smith, you can purchase susiesmith.com. And that’s really, really a powerful factor in SEO. Because when people Google Susie Smith, then susiesmith.com will likely be in the top results. However, if you have a common name like Susie Smith, which I don’t know if that’s taken or not. But if you find that your URL is already taken, you can get a little creative. So you could buy susiesmithauthor.com, susiesmithwriter.com, writersusiesmith.com. There’s a lot of different variations on a lot of different names. But the point of this is make sure that you own your name online and in real life.

Okay, I’m going to talk about one more thing related to tidy information architecture. And that is don’t overwhelm Google and don’t overwhelm your users with too many choices. Have you ever gone to a website, say Home Depot, and noticed that there’s this giant thing called a mega menu? So you maybe hover over appliances and you get this thing that fills up the screen with tiny little words. Each one is a link to a different part of the website. And if you’re looking for kitchen sinks, which I don’t know why you’d be looking under appliances for kitchen sinks, but bear with me. If you’re looking for something in particular, it can be like finding Waldo in a Where’s Waldo book. You do not want to give that experience to your users.

So at any given time, I would recommend having six or fewer choices for the user to choose from. So in your main navigation, in that main menu, I would give your users six or fewer items to choose from. So for me on my website, I have podcast and blog, writing, speaking, and training, tip jar, and contact. So I have five items that users can choose from.

And honestly, I probably don’t even need all of those because to be honest, nobody ever goes to the tip jar, which is okay. But if I were to Home Depot you and give you 800,000 different things to choose from, you’re statistically more likely to leave my site than you are to choose one of those options. So basically, keep it simple.

Okay. I tackled the two tricky things first. So the rest of it should be super easy from here on out. Okay? We’ve covered indexable content and tidy information architecture. And now we’re going to talk about something called OnPage SEO, which is basically, how are you writing on your website? And as writers, you might appreciate this section, or you might hate it. We’ll find out.

Remember earlier when I said that basically search engines have evolved to the point where what’s best for your users is best for the search engine? That goes for your content. So basically all you have to do, in air quotes, all you have to do is write great content. In both search engines and your users will be happy. But, what does great content mean? Well, I’ll tell you. Great content is easy to understand, on topic, answers user questions, and delivers what your users actually want. It sounds easy, but it is so much harder than you think. I know this because I was a content strategist for five and a half years and dealt on a pretty much daily basis with people who, oh my gosh, I want to be very nice when I say this. But people who pushed back really hard against what I was trying to do to help them.

So, okay. Making our content easy to understand, keeping it on topic, answering user questions. Let’s talk about what these mean. So let’s talk about first and foremost, answering user questions or making sure that you’re creating content that your users or the visitors to your website actually want.

Have you ever been to a website where you go there, and just nothing on the homepage is of interest to you, and you start clicking around to find what you’re actually looking for? That’s a very frustrating experience, and it’s not good for your users or SEO. You want to make sure that when people land on your website or a page of your website, because not everybody goes through your home page. To give them exactly what they’re looking for.

So for example, if I am going to the website for a restaurant and I want to know are they open for dinner, are they lunch only, what are their hours? So I’m going to the website and I want to know what are the hours that this restaurant is open? And I go to the page that says hours, and it starts to say, “This restaurant was founded in 1916 by a family of loving individuals who pride themselves on using only the freshest ingredients.” Blah, blah, blah. It’s like okay, whatever. I don’t want this information. I came for the hours. I am on the hours page. Give me the hours for your restaurant. As a user, I’m just going to get irritated and leave and go to a different restaurant website. Hopefully one that actually has the hours that they’re open so I can make a reservation and give them money, thus fulfilling the goal of that restaurant’s website.

Okay. So to create content that your visitors actually want, you have to ask number one, what question does this page answer? And number two, what is the purpose of each page on my website? And to do that, you have to cultivate a little bit of empathy. So you have to be willing to step into the shoes of the person who is visiting your website. And often, what I tell people who own websites is this is often not the content that you want to put out there. So on that hours page, the restaurant was really excited about their history and who they were. That was what they wanted to put out there. But that wasn’t what their user was looking for. So you always have to make sure that you’re catering to the user. If you want to have that information on your website, you totally can. Just make sure it’s under history, or about this restaurant, or maybe even the homepage. Wherever it is a good and logical fit for that information to live.

So what question does each page answer? We talked earlier about a very simple website that was for an author. And the different pages were, so they had a homepage, and then they had about the author books, and then contact information. So about the author would be where does the author live? What’s their backstory? How can I learn more about this author? That’s the question that that page would answer. For the contact page, the question would be, how can I get in touch with the author? And for the books page, the question would be what books has this author written? So each of those three pages answers a question that the user would have and provides information that they are looking for when they visit that page.

All right. The second factor. Is your content easy to understand? This is really, really, really, really hard for writers to do. And it’s funny because you think that as writers, we would be really, really good at communicating clearly. But as writers, I think we also take a lot of pride in the fact that our writing is very beautiful and artful. And we try to sound really smart and eloquent online. When really, what users are looking for online is clarity. So when I say that the writing on your website needs to be easy to understand, what I’m saying is you want to write so that it’s accessible to more people. And to do that, you want to use smaller words, in smaller sentences, and smaller paragraphs. And to do that, you can shoot for what’s called a Flesch reading ease level or an FRE level of 65 or higher. Okay?

So all this sounds totally wacky and you’re like, “What even is going on?” So when we’re talking about making your writing easy to understand, you want it to be readable. You want it to be clear. You want it to convey a message. An FRE level is something that you can calculate. So you can write the content that you want to put on your page and plug it into even Microsoft word has an FRE calculator. If you go under tools, it’ll calculate the FRE of your website. And basically FRE goes on a scale of zero to 100. A 100 is super easy to read. Zero is impossible to read. So reader’s digest, I think is a 70 or 75 FRE. The Harvard Business Review is a 60 FRE. The Sunday newspaper comics are a 92. So you can kind of see a sliding scale there.

Here’s what tricks a lot of people. And here’s what trips a lot of people up. So here’s a good example. I worked with a law firm in making their website. And they said, “Sarah, we need to sound smart.” And I said, “Okay, you’re going to want to shoot for an FRE of 65 to 70.” And they said, “Sarah, you don’t understand. We need to sound smart. The people who we want to work with are at a college level. Therefore, our content should be at a college reading level.” Which that sounds like that would make sense, right? I need to sound smart so people know I’m credible. I need to use all of the words in the thesaurus.

But think about your user. Think about yourself as a user. Say you’re in line at the grocery store and you’re using your mobile phone to look for a lawyer. And you’re college educated, or maybe you’re not. And you’re super smart, either way. But you have two kids in your shopping cart. You have six buckets of melting ice cream, and you’re in a hurry. When you read online, you’re not reading for a collegiate reading experience. You’re not reading for the sheer pleasure of absorbing new words. You are in a hurry and you are skimming. You are looking for the information you need. You need a corporate lawyer. Does this law firm have the type of lawyer you’re looking for?

I know this may hurt your soul as an artist. But when you’re writing online, clarity will always be valued above artisticness. You can save your artisticness for your novel, for your poetry. But when you’re working on your website, you want it to be easy to understand. You want to shoot for that 65, to 70, to 80 FRE level. And if you’re worried that you won’t sound smart, look at Ernest Hemingway. He was the ultimate master of using extremely simple words to convey very complex ideas. And your fellow writers will understand that it is often a lot more difficult and takes a lot more skill to convey very complex and poignant thoughts using very simple words. So just remember, you’re writing for busy people. You are writing for smart people. Yes, but they’re also busy. They are skimming your works, make it easy for them to get the information you need on your website. Just think, you’re doing them a favor. You’re making their life easier. You’re saving them time. That’s worth it. Right?

One little asterisk there, I guess not an asterisk, just an extra bonus point of information, little bonus nugget. Make sure that you’re using a lot of white space as well. So it’s not even just making sure that you’re using sort of simpler, easier to understand words, but that you’re spacing out your paragraphs and that your paragraphs are a little bit smaller. Nobody wants to look at a screen sized wall of text. It’s not scannable. It’s not user friendly. Nobody’s going to dig into that. So if you want people to read your content, make sure that it’s scannable. Make sure that there’s lots of white space to help aid in the digestion. Think of it as a palette cleanser. When they serve you the sorbet between your two courses at your fancy meal. Your website is a fancy meal, and the white space between paragraphs is the sorbet.

Okay. I have two more things to cover. And then I promise we’ll be done. You’re going to want to make sure that your content is on topic. Basically, why are people coming to this page? What do they want to learn about? You want to make sure, and I covered this a little bit briefly earlier. You want to make sure that the history of your restaurant is on the history page, and that the hours of your restaurant are on the hours page.

Similarly for a writer’s website, you don’t want to go to the book’s page and see, “This is why I don’t dye my hair. This is why I’m letting my hair grow naturally gray.” You’re like, “Sarah, I don’t care about your hair. I want to know what books you’ve published.” Make sure things are on topic.

As a quick example, and I hope I’m not getting anyone in trouble. I was working on a website once for a bank, and the bank was very insistent that we build a weather widget onto the homepage of the bank website. And to them, it was like, “Oh man, this is awesome. There’s a weather widget. And people go to our bank website and it tells them what the weather is.”

But as a user, if you’re getting up in the morning and wondering what the weather is going to be, are you going to go to A, your weather app on your phone. B, weather.com, or weather.gov, or whatever you use. C, are you going to turn on the Weather Channel? Or D, are you going to go to your bank’s home page to check the weather app? I’m guessing you would do A, B and/or C, but probably not D. Keep your stuff on topic.

Naturally associated with something being on topic is using something that we call key words. And I want to be really careful when I talk about keywords, because there’s this mentality that the more times you use a word on a page, the more relevant that a search engine will think it is. Like if you’re a flower shop in San Francisco, California, you’ll say, “Welcome to Mod’s Flower Shop in San Francisco, California. We have the best flowers in San Francisco, California. All of our flowers are grown naturally in San Francisco, California. So be sure to stop by Mod’s Flower Shop in San Francisco, California.”

This is something called keyword stuffing. And if listening to me say that irritated you, then reading it as a user will also irritate your users. So please do not keyword stuff. Google has become smart enough that it recognizes keyword stuffing, and it will not reward you for your crappy behavior. So please do not do that.

Make sure that you’ve identified a couple of keywords that users would be searching for that would lead them logically to the page. So if I’m at sarahwerner.com and I am on my books page for books that I’ve written, which that page doesn’t actually exist. Because the books that I’ve written are all ghost written and I’m not allowed to claim credit for them. But, pretend that it exists for this example. I would want to have my name, so Sarah Werner. And probably the word books at least once on that page. I’d also want to have the titles to my books in case people were searching for the titles to my books. So you can kind of see that some keywords are appropriate and necessary to keep things on topic.

Okay. One more thing and then we are done talking about SEO. This one’s simple to understand, but very difficult to do. That is update your content often. Keep content on your website fresh. This might be a little easier for you to do if you’re a blogger who’s blogging once a week or once a day. The more you update your website with fresh new content, the more Google will reward you. And also, people visiting your website like it when you update it with new content. They’re like, “Oh man, Susie Smith published a new blog post. I can’t wait to read it. Hooray.” So isn’t that good? That’s a nice, easy one that will end on there.

Okay. This has been me talking about SEO for a half hour to you. I hope that you are not overwhelmed. I hope that you are doing okay. If you are not doing okay, please breathe deeply into a paper bag and realize that everything will be okay. It will. SEO is not life or death. SEO is something you can do for free to your website to help increase your traffic and to help your website get found among the millions of other websites that it’s competing against. So it’s useful. But if the thought overwhelms you right now, and you’re like, “Sarah, I just can’t.” Then that’s okay. Bookmark this episode and come back to it another time when you feel like you can digest it and implement these suggestions.

I want to tell you a few more things before I stop talking about SEO. There’s a lot of scammers and spammers out in the SEO world. There are people out there who want to take advantage of you, and I don’t want them to take advantage of you. Sometimes on my WordPress site, I’ll get comments from people who I don’t know who are soliciting me and saying, “Hey, the SEO on your website is terrible. Email me and we’ll fix it. Or pay me a million dollars and we’ll fix it.” Those people are not cool. So don’t respond to them. They are looking to take advantage of you.

Another thing that people might try to get you to do is they’ll say, “Hey, I’m going to do SEO for you. And I need you to pay me money to submit your site map to a search engine like Google.” This is not a thing. It used to be, but it is no longer a thing. So if somebody wants you to pay them to submit your site map, be like, “No, you are trying to take my money. This is not okay.”

If you found today’s episode interesting and you are really kind of interested or excited to dig into the results once you implement some of these tactics on your website. Before you implement them, go ahead and make sure you have Google analytics installed on your website. It is free. Do not let anyone charge you for using Google analytics. It is free. And it will let you monitor the different pages on your website, the traffic to your site. It’ll let you see who’s visiting, not uniquely identifying. So you can’t be like, “Susie Smith visited my website at this time.” It’ll just say user. But you’ll get an idea for how people are moving through your website, how many times they’re visiting and all that good stuff. So make sure you install Google Analytics on your site. If you’re not sure how to do it, you can Google it, which is the magic of Google.

And if you are not comfortable installing it, WordPress and Squarespace both have Google Analytics widgets that will kind of take care of that for you. Or you can contact the person who made your website, and they should be able to pop the code right into the header content.

Finally, I promised a URL resource. I promised to send you this website that would let you see your website as Google sees it, as a bot sees it, as something crawling your website sees it. And that website is SEO-browser, B-R-O-W-S-E-R .com. SEO-browser.com. That will let you see what your website looks like to a crawler, to a bot, to Google, to a screen reader. It’s kind of an interesting experience.

So, make sure that your content is indexable. Make sure you have your alt text out there for images. Make sure you’re not using Flash or Java plugins. Make sure that you are transcribing your video and audio or making it accessible somehow to people who need it. Make sure your IA, your information architecture is nice and tidy. Make sure that you have great on page SEO, which means having easy to understand content that is on topic and answers your user’s questions.

We covered a lot today. If you want to know more about SEO, let me know. I’m thinking about maybe publishing a book on SEO for writers. And maybe that would be helpful to you, or maybe it wouldn’t. I’m very interested to hear your feedback. If you would like more technical marketing slanted articles or podcasts, let me know. And if this didn’t work for you, if you’re like, “Yep, nope Sarah, this was horrible and I hated it.” Let me know that too, so that I know not to do too many more of these. So again, this was an experiment. I hope you enjoyed it slash got something out of it. Either way, let me know.

This podcast takes a lot of people to create. And with that, I want to say thank you to all of my Patreon supporters. These are the wonderful people who help pay for hosting and other costs. And they do this through patreon.com. Patreon is a third party platform that lets people donate a dollar per episode, $4 per episode, whatever they think the episode is worth. My brain is dead. I’ve been talking about SEO for too long. If you want to help support my show, go to sarahwerner.com/patreon. That’s P-A-T-R-E-O-N.

Special thanks go to official cool cats Sean Locke and Rebecca Werner, Official bookworms Matthew Paulson and Lilith Black, Official bookworms Matthew Paulson and Lilith Black. Official rad dudes Andrew Coons, and the Sioux Empire Podcast. And official caffeine enablers, Barbara Miller, Harrison Werner, Colleen Cotolessa, and Warwriter. Thank you all so much for helping me do what I do. I appreciate it so much.

Again, let me know what you thought of this episode. And with that, this has been episode 59 of the Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps aspiring writers and all writers to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I’m Sarah Werner. And thanks for listening.