You’ve got a fan site and you just don’t find yourself getting much traffic from search engines. Friends, I was once there too. It took me a long time to figure out there was more to being on the Web than just “build it and they will come”. That doesn’t work even in today’s social media-crazy RSS feed-driven Web.
Being a Tolkien fan is not nearly as cool as it once was. I am sure that will change as the Guillermo del Toro Hobbit Movies release dates come closer.
There will be line parties. There will be product contests. There will be frenzy. There will be Hobbitmania Hobbitocity and Hobbitraciousness galore.
In the meantime here are a few things you should know:
- If you have a blog post to it at least once a week. It doesn’t always have to be about Tolkien.
- If you have a blog publish only a partial RSS feed. This minimizes the damage that Web spam scraper sites can do to your search visibility.
- If you have a blog make sure you ping the blog ping services. That may be as simple as clicking YES on “Make your blog visible to search engines” in your configuration.
- If you have a blog use tags and let the search engines crawl the tag pages. Tag pages on WordPress.com don’t have search-friendly links but they do create visibility for you within the WordPress community.
- DO NOT run around to blogs and forums and leave comments with links. That is so cheap and sleazy it may get you nailed as a spammer.
- DO participate in online discussions about Tolkien. Find a blog or forum community where you like the people and join the fun.
If you don’t have a blog don’t panic. You can still submit your site to a few Tolkien fan site directories. More importantly you can always start a blog and follow my advice above.
And there are other things fan sites can do. Write a few paragraphs of text for every page on your site. Don’t use the same text over and over again (that is called boilerplate and doesn’t help you). Even if you create a photo gallery include captions in the ALT= text use every means available to include visible text above beside or beneath the pictures.
Prominently use the name of your site in your navigation. Don’t use “home” for the anchor text to your main page. Instead if your site is called “Michael’s Cool J.R.R. Tolkien Site” use “Michael’s Cool J.R.R. Tolkien Site” or something like that (if you prefer shorter) to help people and search engines see what the page really is.
You can be as simplistic as using “Tolkien Home Page”, “Tolkien Images”, etc. or as complex as “Michael’s Tolkien Home Page”, “Michael’s Tolkien Images” etc.
If you add a blog to your site write an article about each of your pages and link directly to the page with the words you would normally use to describe that page. For example here is a Guillermo del Toro news section on Xenite.Org. Or here is a Harry Potter Web site in the Xenite network.
Finally if you’re really curious about search engine optimization (which I do professionally) you can check out a Web site I’ve maintained for several years called SEO Theory. There is an SEO White Papers section where you can download .PDF files to help you get started on fundamental SEO principles.
And for really hard core people you can check out these three articles about advanced SEO practices: