©Stina Lindenblatt
Quiz time. Who knows what SEO means? Ten points if you said Search Engine Optimization. Hundred points if you know what the heck that means.
I’ve heard the term bounced around quite a few times, but mostly by social media experts. All the writers I know just shrug their shoulders, having no clue what it is. It’s important, that’s all I know. The higher you’re ranked by some obscure and highly secretive mathematical equation, the better. If you google your name and it shows up on the first page, you’re doing great. If you google your name and it shows up on page twenty, then you’ve got some work to do.
Last week I pointed out a benefit of blogging. Frequent blogging helps your SEO ranking. Blogging once a month doesn’t. Another thing I discovered last week in my social media workshop has to do with links in your posts. You see, if you have dysfunctional links, it hurts your ranking. The more bad links there are, the worse your ranking. I checked my blog using Broken Link Checkand discovered I had well over 100 broken links. It didn’t take long to discover most of them were from my Cool Links Friday posts. They used to work but not anymore.
Because it would have taken more hours than I care to think about to fix the problem, I deleted all my Cool Links posts. I then went back and cleaned up as many of the remaining posts as possible that had broken links.
This took me over two hours, but at least I’ve made the SEO gods happier. In fact they were so happy, when I entered ‘New Adult damaged characters’, my blog is on the first page, right above the reviews for some of my favorite NA novels. Exactly where I want to be, especially when my books are released.
Have you done anything to increase your SEO ranking? Or is this the first time you’ve heard the term?