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 Well, I've been spending a bit of time working on marketing...a must in today's competitve writing world. One of the first things I did, was find all the sites that list author websites and submitted my information. It's a small step, but the more places a webspider reads your link, the higher your web ranking. My biggest problem is deciding whether my work is primarily romance or primarily fantasy. I want to choose fantasy but romance tends to bring more readers. At the same time, if I'm honest about my work, romance comes second to the fantasy. Oh, what a dilemma!
In any case, afterwards, I decided to see how my website ranked against other author websites, so I ran it through http://websitegrader.com and got a fairly decent score of 51 out of 100.
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A website grade of 51/100 for marlavendret.com means that of the hundreds of thousands of websites that have previously been evaluated, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 51% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness. The algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over 50 different variables, including search engine data, website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others.
The website marlavendret.com ranks 480,860 of the 992,209 websites that have been ranked so far.
The software is constantly being upgraded and the algorithm enhanced. The number of potential recommendations provided by the tool is also increasing frequently. Please check back often.
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The webgrader gave me several excellent suggestions for improving my ranking:
- I have over 24 meta keywords and that decreases my ranking. I should restrict them to the top 10.
- This was the quickest fix since I use joomla and can simply upgrade the global meta keyword setting.
- The Webgrader suggested I purchase a ten-year lease on my domain name so I don't get penalized (spammers use 1-year domain names).
- I will address this issue when I have a bit of extra change....
- It also noted that search engines may not recognize that http://www.marlavendret.com and http://marlavendret.com are the same, so I need to set up a permanent redirect. (I never would have thought of that.)
- This was a simple matter of going to my webhost, clicking on "redirect domain," and "add" a redirect
- My website isn't listed with DMOZ, Yahoo, ZoomInfo directories.
- Although I may do a lot of blogs, they aren't being recognized, so I should register with Technorati
- I went to Technorati.com and registered, but my site isn't being listed. I suspect it has something to do with my website being joomla based. I'll continue working on this.
- I should register my blogs with DIGG social media site and Del.icio.us bookmarking
- Registering with http://DIGG.com was simple, as was submitting several old articles at http://digg.com/submit. To try and capture various audiences, I entered articles that fit in different categories.
- Lastly, I should have a community builder (interactivity with readers).
- Since this will cost me, I may be awhile before addressing this problem.
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As seen above, I began implementing the suggestions immediately. I have no way of knowing how quickly these changes will improve my ranking (especially since getting into the directories could easily take months), but I've at least begun the process.
i encourage everyone to use the http://Webgrader.com service and check out your own site. You'll be glad for the help. |
