Links: Random Acts of Publicity

RandomACTS
For more information on the Random Acts of Publicity Week, see this post or the Facebook Event page.

Today’s task for Random Acts of Publicity: Write something online and link to your friend’s website, blog, book page, Facebook page, etc.

Why are we spending an entire day on links? Because of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)!

Getting Your Site Found Online

Everyone has a webpage these days, but how many people visit your blog or website? How do you get more traffic?

Here’s the problem: the internet is large and complex that it’s hard to find anything. What makes it work is search engines which operate on mathematical algorithms to make sure they give you the information you need. It’s not enough to just put up a website any longer; you must now make sure that the site can be found by a search engine. Of course, you’ll be the first site (I hope!) for your name and maybe even the title of your book. But if you have a book about George Washington, will you be found when someone searches for “George Washington”?

You must make certain that you ARE found for that term. Or else the website does you little good.

Fortunately, SEO is easy to accomplish. I won’t go into a full tutorial here. You can read Google’s basic tutorial here.

Links Help You Get Found

For today, the main thing is that Google loves sites with lots of links! Writing something online and linking to a friend’s blog, website or book page is very helpful.

Importance of Text Link. The text you use for the link is important. For example, most links to my blog are for “Fiction Notes” or “Darcy Pattison.” Those are great! However, search engines like it even better (you score higher in their algorithms) if the link text itself is something like “Random Acts of Publicity.” That link text tells search engines more about the content of the site you’ve linked to, which helps the site rank higher in the search engine results. A site with 1000 links will have a higher ranking than a site with 100.

Here are some great link texts:

  • award winning author
  • children’s book author
  • novelist
  • mystery novel set in Egypt
  • middle grade novel
  • teen novel
  • environmental non-fiction
  • biography

In other words, use specific language in your link. Google and all other search engines are just computer programs which depend on algorithms to give certain output. Make sure it get the input that will help your friend’s book! Link!

Today’s task for Random Acts of Publicity: Write something online and link to your friend’s website, blog, book page, Facebook page, etc.

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