Blogs About Short Fiction Stories And Search Engine Optimization

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Blogs About Short Fiction Stories And Search Engine Optimization

By Jeffery Wood | December 19, 2009

So this friend of mine, an aspiring author known as L. Stephen O’Neill, got himself a blog. Well, okay, more specifically I nagged him to death to set up a blog for him to write some background stories for a book he’s working on.

He’s even started an online novel. I don’t know if this is would be considered one of the many short fiction stories you find, or if it would be considered a full length novel, but it’s called The Abbott And The Djinn and if you click on that link you will be taken to the rough outline he has for the story. He’s already gotten a few chapters written for it.

So since I am the one who convinced him to do it and I set up his blog I have also been helping him off and on with SEO and the like. I generally resist just going in and changing things, but once in a while I do. They are usually transparent, like updating plugins or things no one really will ever notice, but every so often I make an occasional change that is noticed.

I made a change to his blog title, you know, the words you see at the very top of your browser. The ensuing exchange in email was him asking a question or two and me writing a novel or two of my own in response.

I thought it might be useful for some of you. I am leaving it more or less in email format, but I’ll do a little editing to clean it up a bit. I’m putting my words in bold and his words in italics.

Hey Steve, I made a couple of changes to your blog, all transparent to you, but I’m letting you know anyway.

Cool, thanks. I also noticed instead of just my name that you added Short Stories of or something like that. That is not technically true but it is more descriptive of what is going on.

Ah yes, I didn’t mention that part did I? I apologize, I should have asked first. There’s a madness behind the reason. The title, which is where your name was, is one of the most important places that the search engines look at and thus, one of the places to make sure your keywords are.

So the chances of someone searching for “short stories” is really high. The chances of someone searching for “L. Stephen O’Neill” is really low.

Search engines try to find the websites that are most relevant to the person’s search terms, and though that small change, and a few others I made, didn’t put you on page one of Google when someone looks for “short stories” you are now at least in the ballpark.

The way it works for us marketers is we think of the terms that people search for, like “short stories” or “Celtic fiction” or whatever. We use a tool or two to come up with other phrases that people search for and see how many people are actually looking for those terms (how many searches per month or per day).
Then we make sure we put those keywords in the areas that Google and other search engines look. This helps us get closer to the coveted page one on a search.

So by changing your title from ‘L. Stephen O’Neill’ to ‘Short Stories by L. Stephen O’Neill’ helped you rank higher in the search engines, didn’t change what you originally had (by much), and still makes perfect sense if not more so to the people finding you. In other words, they may not know who you are, but they now know you have posted some short stories on your website.

Now if we wanted to, we could target other keywords that are not as competitive but still are popular searches. This would get you moving from “in the ball park” to “on the playing field” So for example (I’m making this part up, I did my keyword research for short stories and took it no further), we know that “short stories” is very popular (actually it is a very popular search term) and it’s also highly competitive (again, very true) BUT the term “Celtic Short Stories” is not as popular as ’short stories’ but it is fairly popular and not as competitive. It’s also closer to what your stories are as you are taking much from the culture (a poor way to paraphrase what you said).

So if we changed your title (and made a few minor changes elsewhere) to “Celtic Short Stories by L. Stephen O’Neill”, you move from page 123 up to page 4 AND you are more likely to draw the attention of people who want the subject matter that you write about (Celtic Short Stories) AND the search engines start listing your site with more relevant searches.

But like I said, I made that part up to explain the concept. The research isn’t hard, but it can be time consuming. It’s not a bad idea for you to think about your stories (the ones you intend to write as well as the ones you’ve written) and think of the things that people might search for that match (like Celtic short stories). I can run them through the research and tell you which phrases to go for, then you could figure out how to work them into a description, kind of like I did for ’short stories’.

We make a few changes and BOOM. You start doing better in the search engines, for free. This brings you traffic which increases your ability to get regular readers.

This suggests two things to me. 1) Can I title each page differently and if so how? 2) Perhaps “Free Fiction Writing” or “The Free Fiction, Short Stories and Novels, of L. Stephen O’Neill” might be an even larger honey pot.

If I can change them individually Where and how. If not, are there templates similar to this one that do allow that functionality? Can I put additional information below the heading that read as primary search material? How?

And yes, Celtic Fiction sounds good. I’ll have to answer better later. Thanks

The short answer is yes. The long answer is yes.

SO here’s why there’s a long answer: each post and page can be titled differently. In fact, each page, title, and even blog can have two titles. There’s the readable title and there’s the META title. There’s also two different descriptions with one being readable and the other being META, and the same with keywords (the search terms you picked). Though generally speaking your keywords and the meta keywords will be the same. Offhand I don’t see the advantage to having your readable keywords being different from your meta keywords. If there’s an advantage, I don’t know about it.

The readable title is, as you can tell, readable by humans and the meta title is readable by the search engines, though the search engines actually look at both.

This allows you greater flexibility in your titles and descriptions. Especially for what you are doing. My creativity (as a marketer) has to be limited. I want the post titles and meta titles to match the keywords (like I was explaining in the last email). I want that because I live and die by the search engine traffic. If they both match, that gives me more “authority” in the search engine’s eyes.

The title has to be more readable to people as they are ultimately the ones who click on my site based partially on the title, the meta title can be less readable and more keyword oriented. So you can rewrite your title to put the keywords closer to the front as an example.

It’s easier for me, harder for you. The reason being is that I only have to contend with fairly unoriginal things. I can only reword “oil filters” so many ways and by necessity I don’t get too “clever” or “witty” because that defeats me in the search engines. You as a fiction writer, pick titles based on other things and can (and should I suppose) exercise your creative muscles in your titles. Your title “The Abbott and the Djinn” for example.

But your meta title is for the search engines and can be completely different than your title (but still should be related to the post). For example, one of my posts is called “Please don’t backlink to me” Since backlinking is a good thing, this is a pretty attention getting title, but for the search engines a title like “backlinking the proper way” or “backlinking methods” might have the more popular search terms so I’d put that in the meta title. Actually I may have to go find out.

On my main blog (Sweaty Shop) I don’t really bother myself with keyword research much as it’s mainly for readers. I should, I just don’t. I worry about it more on some of the other sites I have.

The meta description may be the same as the description, but it can also be less readable and more search engine friendly via the keywords. You want the keywords closer to the beginning whenever possible.

SO there’s 3 areas with 3 meta areas. Title, description, and keywords. On the screen where you enter in the post itself, right under the writing part is a box called “excerpt” and that’s where your 3-5 sentence description goes. On the right side there’s a small box called “Tags (Simple Tags)” and that’s where your keywords go. Now I originally installed a plugin that autogenerates keywords, but it’s accuracy is…yeah. So it’s better for you to enter your own.

If you scroll down the screen, near the bottom you will find an area called “All-In-One SEO” and it has a spot for a title, description, and keywords. That’s your META stuff. Even just doing a straight copy/paste of your title, excerpt, and keywords into here is better than nothing.

If you haven’t been doing that then you can always go back into your posts and copy/paste the info into the “All-In-One” SEO area then click on “update post” (that button will be where the original “publish” button was”.

You can always go back and re-edit all of your posts and pages.

SO anyway, that was the exchange. I hope it was of value to you but even more so, if you do like fiction and/or short stories then please go to http://lstephenoneill.com and check it out.

And if you like what you see, then do me (and him) a big favor. Throw a keyword appropriate link to him, like I did in the first or second paragraph of this post and direct anyone you know who likes that kind of stuff to his site.

Don’t do it just because I asked though, only do it if you genuinely like (or at least don’t mind) his writings. He does have some political views on there also, but it’s the short fiction stories or free Celtic stories (whichever) I’m talking about.

– Jeffery

About Jeffery:
Jeffery Wood, author of "Learn How To Set Up Your Own WordPress Blog And Forum" is a Part-Time Internet Marketer.

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