What I know about SEO
What I know is a tiny basic bit, and I haven’t even been that timely with it myself, adding “weblit” only relatively recently. There’s lots more to SEO than what is below. But it’ll give us a start. I hope others more expert than I will add to this thread. If I have written something wildly incorrect, you may first laugh loud and long at me, and second, write a correction.
IMPORTANT NOTE: below I will show samples of HTML code. The brackets SHOULD be the pointy type: < > . I have had to change them to square brackets – [ ] – due to Drupal’s insistence on taking anything in a post like this between pointy brackets as code intended for this post, and disappearing it because it's not one of the allowed HTML tags. There is a command to get around this but I can’t seem to make it work. SO if you copy code from here, as I will suggest, you have to use a global search and replace to convert the square brackets back to pointies. Sorry for the inelegance.
SEO stands for search engine optimization – methods of making sure search engines, in particular Google, find your website.
Theory
Let’s google… “web fiction”. One of the first entries on the page is for the “Ultimate Science Fiction Web Guide.” I use it as an example because its authors have done what I’m going to recommend.
Here’s what we see:
ULTIMATE SCIENCE FICTION WEB GUIDE
ALMOST SIX THOUSAND LINKS TO WEB SCIENCE FICTION RESOURCES! The 'Ultimate Science Fiction Web Guide' is the largest on-line encyclopedia of science fiction, ...
www.magicdragon.com/UltimateSF/SF-Index.html - Cached - Similar -
But if you go onto the site, the above are not the same first words as you see on it. And whatever the site authors put on the home page – they can have it change every five minutes if they want – the above little description you see on Google will remain the same.
How are they doing that?
Go onto the site. If you are using Firefox, click “View” then “Page Source.” If you are using IE, click on “Page” and then “View Source.” What will come up is a page of HTML code, first part of which looks like this (but with pointy, not square, brackets):
[HTML]
[HEAD]
[TITLE]ULTIMATE SCIENCE FICTION WEB GUIDE[/TITLE]
[META NAME="Author" CONTENT="Jonathan Vos Post"]
[META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="author, writer, science fiction, sci-fi, sci fi, fantasy,
biography, bibliography, chronology,
horror, pulp, novel, time travel,
literature, press, alien,
extraterrestrial, book, clone,
cyberpunk, dystopia, erotic, esp, feminist,
heroic, immortal, invisible, politics, sex,
space, superman, unicorn, utopia, undersea,
AUTHORS, BOOKSTORES, TITLES, GAMES, SOFTWARE,
MAGAZINES, NEWSLETTERS, MOVIES, PARTIES, POETRY,
TOURS, PUBLISHERS, STORIES, HYPERTEXT, TELEVISION"]
[META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Alpha 6.12, Netscape"]
[META NAME="Description" CONTENT="ALMOST SIX THOUSAND LINKS TO WEB SCIENCE FICTION RESOURCES!
The 'Ultimate Science Fiction Web Guide' is the largest on-line encyclopedia of science fiction,
with over 9,396 Science Fiction biographies, bibliographies, hotlinks."]
[META NAME="expiration" CONTENT="November 20, 2004"]
[/HEAD]
[BODY BGCOLOR="67FF70"]
…etc.
All HTML files, i.e. web pages, have two parts: a head and a body. Head is what’s between [head] and [/head] and body, what’s between [body and [/body]. (Remember: the brackets should really be pointy.) The head is where you do your SEO.
We’re kind of going backwards, but: there’s that description, after the code [META NAME="Description" CONTENT="
Whatever you write in there is what will show up on your google entry. Put stuff there that will pull people in! It also helps the google bots, which roam around the web looking for new stuff, to categorize you.
What helps them even more is keywords, which come after the code [META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="
This is where you put in the words you want to cause your site to come up when people enter them to do a Google search. Right now I have my upgraded site set up with these words:
weblit, web fiction, online novels, webfic, free book, fantasy fiction, fantastic fiction, science fiction, web literature, literary fantasy, Chevenga, Karen Wehrstein, Philosopher in Arms, asa kraiya
(Though I would never call my own work webfic for fanfic reasons, I’m not above using it as a keyword. People looking for fanfic find my site and like what they see? Not a problem. I use “weblit” in anticipation that people will search for it once it becomes better known. Alexandra Erin now uses but two hashtags in her tweets: #ae_stories and #weblit. Nuff said. )
Warning: don’t repeat words. Google scores you down for that. Don’t use words so generic that a zillion sites use them, so yours will be on page 1 billion. (E.g.: “book, novel, writing.” “Science fiction” is pushing it.) I use the name of the main character in the hope that someday he’ll be famous enough that people will Google his name. I added the titles recently because I’ve had people search for “asa” and “philosopher in arms” as well as my name. Separate them with commas; two words separated only by a space will be counted as one keyword.
Don’t forget the closing bracket.
What’s between [title] and [/title] will show up on the very top line of readers’ browsers when they’re on the page. But it is also used by the Google bots, so remember and balance both purposes when choosing it. A book title is a good one, as in “(Book Title) by (Your Name)”.
Implementation
If you use web design software that lets you directly manipulate the code in the head, you’re set. Just use the code per above but insert your own content and change the brackets to pointies.
If you are on Digital Novelists: as a result of my prompting, MeiLin recently enabled metatags for all of us. Click on “Administer” then under “Content Management” click “Metatags.” For our purposes for now – in part because I’m not sure what a number of the other options are here, so I haven’t messed with them – we’ll just check the boxes and fill in the blanks to SEO as I’ve described above. Check “Description” and “Keywords” in both the “Metatags to show on edit forms” and “Metatags to output to HTML” boxes.
Next down is “Meta tags creation options.” I have user profile metatags enabled, and also “Repeat meta tags for lists, because I was unsure (see last sentence). “Use front page meta tags” is checked too, so I can control what goes on there. Leave “Maximum meta tags length” at 350 as that is a good length, even a little long for Google descriptions.
Next is “Meta tags content generation options”. What happens if you have no descriptions is that words will just be pulled out of the first line of a page and used in the Google listing. You don’t necessarily want that… spoilers, etc. … at least I don’t, so I clicked “Do not generate meta tags content”. That makes the rest of that box irrelevant.
“Auto-keywords vocabularies”: this allows auto-generation of keywords for pages from the sources listed. Up to you.
Perhaps when I understand what a canonical URL is I’ll tell you what you should put in the “Base URL” line, other than nothing, which is working fine for me.
Global keywords: here’s where you put keywords that you want on every page, so they should apply to every page. (Silly me, I didn’t discover this until I’d set all the keywords on all my pages, mostly the same.)
I haven’t touched anything else on the metatags settings other than “Save Configuration”. No worries: if you screw up royally there’s always that “Reset to Defaults” button.
Now go up to the top: next to “Settings” you’ll see “Default and specific meta tags.” You go in there to set more defaults for your pages – default descriptions, default copyright notices, etc. You can also set specific ones for the front page, tracking pages, and error pages.
To set metatags for an individual page, go to it and hit “Edit”. You’ll see familiar boxes: keywords, description, etc. Note also “Revisit after” – this is useful for sites which update content frequently, as we all have. Because I update every weekday, I have mine set to one day.
If you use Drupal but are not on Digital Novelists, make sure metatags are activated and then – I believe – you can operate as above. Not sure how to do this, but “metatags” would be the word to search in help.
If you use Blogspot… viewing source on my existing Blogspot sites shows me I did this, and I cannot for the life of me remember how, lol! Retracing my steps… well, let’s start here. From Dashboard go to your blog and click on the Settings tab. A little way down is “Let search engines find your blog?” You definitely want to set that to “Yes”.
But it looks like after that I edited the HTML to put in the description and keywords. Click on the “Layout” tab, then click “Edit HTML.” Your keyword and description code – again, as per above – should come right after [/title]. Notice it’s [/title] not [title]. And the brackets are pointy. If you’re worried about messing up, use the utility provided to back up your blog template before you edit. The title, incidentally, you will have already set.
If you use LiveJournal… sorry, capriox and others, I know you don’t want to hear this, but I have no idea how you do it. Suggest hitting the help utility and searching for “keywords” or “meta” or “metatags”. If it’s a matter of editing HTML, it’s as per above.
If you use WordPress, ditto.
Very useful to remember: it’s easy, anywhere, any time, to see what other site authors have done with titles, descriptions and keywords. “View” then “Page source” or “Page” then “View source” and look in the head.
You should also register your site or sites with Google and Yahoo at least. A whole other topic.
Note: your changes won’t show up immediately on a Google search. It takes the bots a few weeks to find them.
Good luck, and again, correct me where necessary. All errors are mine.
Hee hee, I love it when people think up ideas like that. And share them. Thanks, Valerie.
Valerie's idea is actually counter-productive, for a number of reasons.
It was once common web practice (back in the late 90s) to do that -- list your keywords in the same color as the background color, somewhere near the footer of the page. People would use it as a convenient way to pad their keywords and make them appear more relevant than they really are. Search engine have since caught on, and modified their bots to contextually compare words in a sequence to determine if they're likely to be actual sentences or just lists of random keywords. Long lists of random keywords showing up in the body text can actually hurt your rankings, as they're commonly used by spam sites and therefore get dropped from search engines.
Further, search engines are now using a thing called keyword density to influence the ranking of websites. Essentially, this is a ratio of keywords to the total text of a page, and should roughly be around 3-5%. In other words, if you list 5-10 keywords, those keywords should be included in the body content of the page and consist of some 3-5% of that text. You don't want your keywords to show up too often -- this, again, is seen as spammy behavior and can get you dropped.
A few minor tips and tricks for SEO that I've picked up over the years.
Images & SEO
Search engine bots don't load images, but they do read filenames and things you set in your alt text. Next time you put an illustration of your main character, don't name it image1.jpg. Name it my-main-character.jpg and give it an alt text with that character's name.
Links & SEO
The anchor text of inbound links really holds a lot of weight with search engines. If people link to your site and include your keywords in their anchor text, it can really boost your rankings for those keywords. For this reason, try to encourage people to include your keywords in their links to you.
Links from .edu and .gov domains hold more weight than links from .com, .net, .org, etc. domains. On the other hand, .edu and .gov domains are hard to get links from -- if you're a college student, see if you can do something like a project that includes a website linking to your site.
Anchor text of interior links -- this is less important than the anchor text of inbound links, but including keywords in the alt text of your internal links can boost your rankings for certain pages. Many people forget to include alt text when they create a link, so this is an often overlooked process.
Your site ranks higher if you have lots of inbound links but few outbound links. For this reason, link exchanges aren't very productive from an SEO viewpoint.
Check out the following site -- a list of 77 things you can do and how they impact your search engine rankings. Note that the scores are somewhat relative, with +3 being a big adjustment, and a +1 being a minor adjustment.
[feh -- where's that delete button?]
Thanks GG for the additional tips. I'll be using them. Got more, bring 'em on. We can each go into it to the depth we are inclined/able. You're actually the person I was most afraid of getting caught for mistakes by 
Very helpful article, thank you, Karen.
And ditto to the warning against same-color text. That is a "black hat" technique very very well known to the search engines, and will likely get you dinged pretty badly in results.
re: seo for Livejournal...
I've nosed around lj's support FAQs and looked at the source for my lj home page, and from the looks of it, there's not really anything you can do to seo a lj. There's no ability to manipulate any of the information in the [head] of the page - the page's title is actually coded as
[div id="title"]
[h1]bovidae at play[/h1]
in the [body] section, and everything else that you can customize is in the [body], too. There's no metatags/keywords whatsoever in the [head] and lj's in-house tags are links to that tag's page in their system, not any sort of external keyword listing.
Just another reason to switch to digitalnovelists or a DIY site if I get past the "just a hobby" phase, I guess
Wow. Good to know. I'm kicking those darned things off.
I guess the problem that I have is that my landing page doesn't really have much text on it at all. I have a widget that imports my blog onto the page and a bunch of links to my books...
Would it be better to have the keyword tags in the head and no text that references them in the site? Or should I add text to the site somewhere that references some of the important keywords?
Edit: Adding a link to my page for reference.
Yeah, good way to get delisted is to use "disappearing" text.
Re: meta tags on Drupal--
It's not "core." You have to download, install and turn on the Nodewords module.
Valerie, one of my SEO-savvy clients uses a little blurb in one of his sidebars with the search phrase he wants the site to show up under. It shows on every page.
SEO as a rule is difficult to do for writing sites.
Consider your top keywords -- your url, your site's title, and your frequent topics. If you do no other thing with SEO, these three things will spell out the majority of your keywords.
If your blog is about John Deere tractors, you probably have something like johndeereblog.com as a url, your title is something like John Deere Tractor Blog, and your post titles frequently use the term John Deere.
Now, look at most of our sites. Your url is either your name/pen-name (gabrielgadfly.com, meilinmiranda.com) or the title or acronym of your work (peacock-king.infernalshenanigans.com, www.lordlikely.com, roydss.blogspot.com). Your title is probably your name/penname or the title of your work. Worse, your post titles are probably things like "Chapter 1;" "Part III;" or clever chapter titles that work within the frame of literature, but don't work for SEO.
The problem with "Gabriel Gadfly" from an SEO standpoint is that no one searches for "Gabriel Gadfly" unless they already know the name. But someone searching for "blogs about john deere tractors" will turn up the johndeereblog.com. It's the difference between someone searching for you because they know you (and may want to know more about you) and someone discovering you because they searched for something you talked about.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. As writers, we're branding ourselves by our names and styles. Anyone looking for Stephen King knows to go to stephenking.com. Anyone looking for Neil Gaiman knows to go to neilgaiman.com. People as a rule don't use search engines to discover new writers -- they turn to reviews, word-of-mouth, recommendations, advertising, and directory- or gallery-based sites for that. Same with music and art.
What people DO use search engines for is finding more about writers they're interested in. That means finding articles you've been mentioned in, offsite interviews you've done, other bits of miscellaneous writing you've done that might not be stored on your main site, community sites you haunt (like your Facebook fan page or deviantart account).
That was exactly the problem I noticed when I was SEO'ing my own site. "Dang," I thought, "why am I not in business doing something like John Deere tractors?" Well, not quite in those exact words, but--something more nuts-and-bolts specific.
I could use my name and titles -- but who's ever heard of them? Or I could use words like "science fiction" or "writing," but how would I ever get found in the heap of results? There was nothing with that mid-range specificity that a site needs to get found. It's one reason why I came up with the word "weblit." If it gains enough traction, it will get searchers zeroing in right on us.
Quick comment here since it's sortof on topic.
If you search google for digital novelists you get the following text:
Fresh Stories Daily | DigitalNovelists.com
blog advertising is good for you. Blogads Book Hive Advertise here for your next book promotion! Digital Novelists Blogads Network ...
I think this would look better if it said something about Digital Novelists itself no?
Maybe you should all check out your stories to see what shows up. I think a 1 sentence blurb would be best 
I haven't even had a chance to look at that. Thanks for looking at it for me! 
Since I haven't seen anyone else link this yet - meta tags for self-hosted wordpress installations are easy http://codex.wordpress.org/Meta_Tags_in_WordPress
Sadly it's impossible at wordpress.com (however apparently you can use post tags the same way).
I don't know why but SEO fascinates me from a purely intellectual standpoint (as well as being darned good for traffic if done right). It's almost like a game, can you beat out the other sites competing for your keyword without breaking the rules and getting thrown out of the field?
So I'm thinking of writing a blog post series called "The Great Web Fiction SEO experiment" in which I will detail my attempts to improve Firebird Fiction's search engine ranking using white hat seo methods I've picked up from reading various sites.
Would people be interested in such a series? It'll post weekly on Saturdays on my wordpress.com blog.
Becka
Sadly it's impossible at wordpress.com (however apparently you can use post tags the same way).
I don't know why but SEO fascinates me from a purely intellectual standpoint (as well as being darned good for traffic if done right). It's almost like a game, can you beat out the other sites competing for your keyword without breaking the rules and getting thrown out of the field?
So I'm thinking of writing a blog post series called "The Great Web Fiction SEO experiment" in which I will detail my attempts to improve Firebird Fiction's search engine ranking using white hat seo methods I've picked up from reading various sites.
Would people be interested in such a series? It'll post weekly on Saturdays on my wordpress.com blog.
Becka
I'd be interested in reading such a series.
So would I, thanks in advance!
Okay then
The first post will be about the Joys of Keyword Research (aka - people never search for what you think they will) and working out which keywords to optimise for in the first place. There will be tables and possibly graphs.
*grumbles about most of the keyword tools she used to use disappearing into the digital void*
Becky
The Great Web Fiction SEO Experiment Week One - The Research is now live at http://beckyswritingblog.wordpress.com/2010/01/30/web-fiction-seo-one-re...
In which I try to research keywords and find out it's not as easy as it was a few years ago.
I've come up with a list to use, but I'm not 100% certain I trust the adwords tool numbers. If anyone knows another free keyword suggestion tool I can double check with please tell me.
I hope you guys find this helpful.
Next Saturday - The On-page Optimisation
Becka
Well I've been working on the on-page optimisation in preperation for Saturday's Blog Post, and I've come across a really useful plugin for those of us using wordpress. I'll talk more about it on Saturday, but I just had to share it now.
This plugin allows you to have a page title which is different from the post title, and to set up your meta tags to be different on each page. It has a pile of other functions I haven't even touched yet.
I've been playing with it this evening and while I haven't done every page yet you can see it works if you look at The Dragon Wars' Contents Page and look at the title bar.
Becka
Okay, Weblit peeps,
Here's The Great Web fiction SEO Experiment Week Two - Beginning the On-Page Optimisation. Any questions, just ask.
Becka
Sorry it's a day late amd a litte lame. Link building is not my strong point.
Next weekend I have a friend down from Scotland so there may not be a post.
Becky
Thank you, Becca, for sharing all this information!
Becca, please keep going even if people aren't responding... I know for myself that even if I am not reading it now I will in the future when you've got more results racked up, and I bet that's true for others. Keep up the awesome work, we need it and appreciate it!
Don't worry, I'm not stopping the posts. It's just this Saturday I have a guest, so I may not have time to pull together a post.
Especially since I'm still trying to develop a good link building strategy.
Becky
Hum, SEO Saturday will be today or Monday this week. I've kind of been side-tracked by writing (and for the first time in ages by drawing).
It's going to be a bit more general this week. I've been reading an article about online book promotion and a lot of it is good SEO advice which can be applied to weblit (or indeed any site) with a bit of tweaking. So I'll be making some suggestions and outlining some plans of my own based on that.
Becky
I read somewhere that google won't read your keywords if they aren't also mentioned somewhere in the site. (Trying to keep people from driving traffic to sites that don't actually have anything to do with their keywords, I suppose.) To that end, I put all my keywords in tiny text at the bottom of my page in the same color as the background, so that you can't see them. Of course, I code my own site. I don't know if a blog will let you make your words impossible to see.