If prospective readers are searching for you or your books, you want your website to be one of the first results they see. All Author Websites are SEO-friendly by default, with built-in tools designed to optimize your website content for search.
How does Author Websites optimize my site for search traffic?
Once you’ve connected a domain, your website will be indexed for search engines. Here are some of the ways Author Websites automatically helps make your website more discoverable:
- Built-in schema markup for books, series, retailer options and more — this gives search engines extra context about your books and author identity, which can improve how your listings appear in results (like showing star ratings or book details)
- Automatic sitemap generation, including for all book and series pages, to help search engines discover and index your pages
- Automatic metadata creation based on book summaries, author bio and more
What else can I do to improve my site's SEO?
If you want to boost your website’s position in search results, here are some additional tactics we’d recommend:
- Customize your metadata. You can personalize your website title, description, and social media sharing image via the SEO Data Preferences page under your dashboard Settings.
- Ensure your website’s name and domain are closely aligned with your key search terms. Your website title is, by default, your author name. To ensure the greatest likelihood of your website ranking in search results for your author name, you should also consider using a domain name that includes your author name (e.g., yourname.com or authoryourname.com).
- Add keywords to your website content. Where possible, ensure that content on your website — like your author bio, book descriptions, blog posts, and custom pages — include keywords (search terms) that you want your website to rank for.
- Add content to your website. Generally speaking, more content means more for search engines to find on your website! Adding relevant content to your website in the form of blog posts, updates, events you’ll attend, media coverage you’ve received, and custom pages can all help your website’s visibility.
- Build backlinks between your website and other trusted sites. Publishing links to your website on other trusted sites — such as social media platforms, book review sites, or websites in your genre or niche — can signal your website’s credibility to search engines and help improve its ranking. Note that quality is a more important factor than quantity, so focus on adding links to your website where they will naturally be of value to those who click on it.
Please note that your website’s exact ranking in search results will depend on the search engine, the exact search terms used, and the popularity of those search terms.