SEO for an unknown author

what's the best approach?

[webwoman]

I have been hired by a novelist to design and optimize his website. The design is done, and now I have to come up with some creative ways to market and optimize the site. He currently has a couple books for sale via Amazon, so obviously he wants to direct as much traffic that way as possible. He has many pages of essays, poems, vignettes. These are pretty useless to me as far as keyword optimization go. There are some press release type pages, and I can do something with these I think.

All my seo clients have been businesses - this is the first individual I have tried to market. He is unknown, so his name has little value on the internet. The keywords author, novelist, fiction writer, mystery writer seem so broad.

I am trying to imagine what publics I might target or what keywords the book buying public uses. Any ideas are much appreciated. Also any thoughts anyone has for linking strategies and additional pages I could come up with.

-webwoman

[anallawalla]

The novel must have a genre. Search for it, e.g. "romantic novels" and see if similar authors come up.

Why would people need to go to this person's site? I like a few authors, but I have never even considered looking for their web site. OTOH, if this author can create a following, e.g. by showing up in Novel Writer forums, Book lovers forums (I am assuming they exist), e.g. then selecting URL drops may be possible.

Get him interviewed by magazines and online book reviewers (if they appear to have links to the authors in their reviews).

- Ash

[fathom]

One of the best approaches for this is use "informative" content (topics) to initially develop awareness and interest.

Brett's philosophy of the "spaghetti effect" will produce far more than "keywording it".

The theme of the page (the text) become the title, attributes etc.

Don't even attempt to try the steer a page or pages to something "keywordie" (at first)... just optimize precisely what is there (no more, no less), post it and wait for google to crawl.

In the mean time develop as many links as possible, first by common directories such as:

„« DMOZ.org
„« Josh.nu
„« Zeal.com
„« About.com
„« Jayde.com
„« JoeAnt.com
„« Gimpsy.com
„« SoMuch.com
„« SeekOn.com
„« GoGuides.org
„« SurfPoint.com
„« 123World.com
„« SuperPages.ca
„« linkopedia.com
„« SunSteam.com
„« Invisible-Web.net

See if he can pay for Yahoo, etc.

Go on to his theme directories - type in a few words in google + directory and see what comes up, and attempt to add the site.

and when you have exhausted these, look for some link exchanges.

Once Google has thoroughly indexed the site, watch the logfiles and see where on the wall the spaghetti stuck... and then improve these ranked pages first, and adjust adjacent pages to support.

By now you have a qualified "guage" of what to actually optimize the site for.

Yes it takes time > but in the end this is far easier to you to do and as a result the clients will appreciate the qualified traffic... based on actual page content... and not that manipulated optimized stuff...

Which > if for example as anallawalla suggests "romantic novels" would need to be a site page with actual "romantic novels" content but if not, the optimization for the keyword is in vein.

[rossH]

fathom I hadn't come across the spaghetti effect before, I'll save your post for reference .. I'm struck by what enormously useful replies webwoman received to her dilemma

I have nothing useful to add, except agreement - the keywords exist but are currently unknown on the Internet, so classic marketing and gradual, relentless public relations are called for

maybe the author could start a weblog too?

[fathom]

Spaghetti Effect [webmasterworld.com]

Although he used the analogy long for here.

[webwoman]

Get him interviewed by magazines and online book reviewers

Great idea annalawalla.

Fathom - this makes a lot of sense. I realized in reading your suggestions that his most recent book can be promoted heavily within Boy Scout Troops and related sites since it was written about a Troop and appeals to that age group (has an adult following as well).

rossh - a weblog? Hmmm...do you know where I would start in learning how to create this? I think this has good possibilities for starting a fan club.

This writer has several published books - all in different genres, and for different age groups. But I do think the way to market this is by publics, not products.

Thanks for the excellent advice.

[rossH]

webwoman

I know nothing about weblogs, but I imagine you can find out here, I'd like to know myself

also - controversial - you see webrings built up around celebrities, and that's the goal here is to make him famous. I get the impression webring is a deprecated move here, from pr0 fears, but too bad because it's a wonderful Web kind of thing that works, imho.

If there's kids involved - and if the author is actually worthy of all this - maybe you can seed a discussion about who liked which part of the book/story best (It is fiction?), prize for best suggested suggested alternative ending, so forth.

but beware of starting an actual board, there's a recent thread here changed my mind about taking on that enormous workload (you'd need a boy scout troop to administer it ;))