Ballea Writers Club

Introduction to Writers Websites.Writers Websites on Top will help writers and writing groups achieve a website that promotes their writing and optimises their through traffic. For SEO, search engine optimisation, the website must be content rich rather than 'brochure ware.' And to get a high search engine ranking a website needs to be written in the correct format, have a sitemap and employ the correct title, file names, keywords, key phrases and other meta tags. And the website needs to be correctly tested and submitted to search engines, directories and indexes.
The aim is to achieve the highest quality website one can write because if a writers website is poor it implies that his writing will also be poor. Writers Websites on Top will help writers: plan a website; instruct a webmaster; get what they want with minimal frustration and avoidance of common pitfalls; promote the website ranking; and foster the long-term management of the website. Writers Websites on Top is written for writers and writing groups rather than software experts and is not a course on HTML or any other computer language.

What Will a Writers Website Cost? The initial programming of Ballea Writers Club website cost Euro 500, the photography Euro 100, the publication scans Euro 60, the Domain name Euro 10, the hosting Euro 50 and the early updates Euro 250. So the cost of this writers club website came in at just under Euro 1000 for the first year and the running cost, including monthly updates, will be under Euro 500 for the second year. A budget such as this assumes that the authors do the writing themselves and find people to do the programming and other jobs at semi charitable rates.
A fully commercially commissioned website would be, 2008, in the region of Euro 3000 to design, write and program, and cost Euro 100 per hour for the updates. Add to that professional photography and commercially rated hosting and the bill for a year would be over Euro 5000.
A syndicate group website or writers club website spreads the cost and can, where writing standards are high, be as beneficial as having one's own writers website, especially if the writers group site has a high search engine ranking.

Do Writers Need Websites? Yes, it has become virtually impossible for a writer to be taken seriously without having a website. Publications such as writers magazines will put your website address on anything that writers publish with them. Not to be able to engage in further showcasing your writing through your website is wasted opportunity.
If a writer can achieve a website for little cost then he should get one because not having a website these days is as unprofessional as not having a business card. But if writers don't have the skills/contacts to get a website built economically they need to find them because it would be virtually impossible for a writers website to pay for itself at Euro 5000 or more. Writers can build DIY websites fairly easily by employing the software of Adobe Dreamweaver or Adobe GoLive, both available as downloads.

Do Websites Earn Writers Money? No, at least not in the short term but if well designed and operating properly a website can earn writers respect and earn them contacts that can lead to money in the long term.
It is unrealistic to think that a writer will find a publisher for a rejected book or get an influx of customers for a self-published book from having a website. Publishers have slush piles so they are very unlikely to be trawling the net looking for a virtual author to invest in. And the reading public may buy an occasional book from an authors website but most will go to Amazon.

Will Advertising Cover the Cost? Research reveals that the writers who get around 1000 hits per week on their websites earn about Euro 100 per year from hits on their Goggle advertising boxes on their Home Page. Euro 100 is a small amount of money for a writer to trade for a large chunk of their Home Page and 10 cents a click doesn't compensate for diverting one's own traffic away. Writers should aim to hold onto whatever traffic they get for as long as they possibly can.

What Can Cover Website Costs? Sponsorship. In the case of Ballea Writers Club we found in excess of twenty local companies who were willing to sponsor our writing group website. In return we provided links on the right hand side of our pages. But we placed these logo/links outside our page frames where they didn't distract from our content.
An individual author is unlikely to get sponsorship unless he does something for his community: such as giving creative writing workshops where he pledges half the fee to his writers website and half to a local charity or library.
In Ireland the Arts Office does not give grants for writing club websites never mind individual author websites. But if one is: writing full time and able to show some sort of income from writing, disabled, made redundant or unemployed and have taken up writing, one may be eligible for business start up grants and other specialist grants. And banks and other institutions give loans to build websites, but if your writers website doesn't make money, as many don't, you'll have the interest and the loan to pay off!
Established authors should negotiate with publishers to provide the authors with websites as part of their book deals.

Do Websites Get Writers Publications? Yes if writers have previous hard copy publications on display on their websites. And as long as the material on a writers website is written to a professional standard it is somewhere to refer editors to look when they are evaluating a writers C.V. There is little that impresses editors more than visiting a writers website and seeing a display of plenty of previously published material. Anything as small as a 'Letter to the Editor' at a newspaper is given more credence when the writer includes a website address.
Having a professional website still puts a writer among the minority of writers and thus gives him an edge when competing for an editor's, agent's or publisher's attention, but only where they have seen a sample of the writers work in hard copy, are impressed with what they saw, and want to read more of his range.

Profiling Potential Website Traffic to a writers website is a fundamental marketing issue that needs to addressed before a writer embarks on getting a website designed. As authors we can predict that our traffic could be drawn from friends and family, professional authors, amateur writers who aspire to be published, and if we are lucky, editors, agents and publishers. And we may get some reading public as well but the public are fickle and difficult for writers to profile and design for.
Friends and family would probably applaud whatever we put up but the writing/publishing consortium want to read well-written material that is presented in a familiar format not too far removed from hard copy publications.

What Type of Writers Website? Knowing that our audience is primarily the writing/publishing consortium tells us that the bulk should be organised into sequenced 'chapters,' the individual pages should look like those of a newspaper, magazine or book and have a maximum of ten words per line. The layout should be a plain black font on a pale coloured background, the only bold colour should be in the header bar, photos and the link highlights, and the text should be static and well spaced.

Instructing a Website Programmer. Much of the reason that writers websites fail to get the traffic/response they expect is because their website is inappropriate for the writers purpose, usually because the client didn't adequately brief the programmer or he let the programmer double as the designer. An author should largely design the website himself and shouldn't approach a programmer until he has written the texts, slotted the photos and illustrations in where he wants them, organised the chapters, subchapters and headings, and produced a hard copy.
The writer should also have a good idea of the logo and the colour scheme in advance.
In the case of Ballea Writers Club we gave the website designer the writing group business card to work from. The more a writer can do his own design work and lead the programmer, the more likely he is to get what he wanted. Left to their own devices website designers can be as avant-garde as architects and build something impractical and impossible to live with that the client still has to pay for.
An excellent way for a writer to lead a programmer is to direct him to a couple of websites that he likes and ask the programmer to work from their model and tailor a website to the specified needs of the writer.

What Writers Should Avoid. Avoid long pages, long horizontal lines of text, short lines piled into narrow columns of text, strong coloured background, coloured text, disorganisation, clutter, typos, poor grammar, inconsistent fonts and inconsistent page layouts, tiny print, an abundance of advertising, rollover displays, music and other gimmicks. Gimmicks add to the cost of the website, look unprofessional to the writing/publishing consortium and drive people away without reading.

How Many Chapters? Twelve is the ideal maximum number of chapters because it seems like a book and it is difficult to fit a horizontal list of more than twelve chapters on the header bar. And running the table of contents in a long list down the right hand side of the home page takes up valuable space and means that people cannot see the contents list without scrolling. Writers should, as a general rule, avoid expecting visitors to scroll to find something because, faced with scrolling, visitors tend to get frustrated and leave websites.

How Many Sub Chapters? The number of sub chapters/folders can be infinite as long as they are organised for easy recognition, navigation and access. The chapter headings can provide drop down lists of the subchapters. Where the number of subchapters is large it is advisable to provide an internal search engine. For example, the Publications chapter of Ballea Writers Club website currently offers twelve published authors in alphabetical order. Then each author has a drop down list of his subchapters, his actual publications. But when our number of published authors exceed one viewing frame we will install an internal search engine like that of our bookshelf/club library..

Sequence Sub Chapter Material. Ease of access is crucial to keeping visitors on a writers website so make sure that material is organised by alphabetical order, by date order or by work through order. For example: our Ballea Writers Club Bookshelf is presented in alphabetical order, our members' publication lists go backwards from the most recent, and 'Writers Websites on Top' presents introductory material before the more advanced.

Create Clickable Sub Sections. Visitors who can't click through a website with the same ease that they can flick through books or television channels will get frustrated and leave. For example, few visitors would start at the introduction of Writers Websites on Top and read to the bottom without first looking at some of its individual clickable sections.

The Front Cover of Websites. It is what is on the cover page of a magazine or newspaper that gets people to read inside/buy it and the same applies to the home page. So rather than writing anything in particular depth on the home page writers want, in their ten seconds window, to reveal snippets/glimpses that entice visitors to stay on the writers website longer and navigate. The home page must be the first page. Never precede the home page with a text deficient page with no navigation bars that only gives the option of clicking to enter the website because nearly half the potential traffic will think of this as a trap door and leave out of fear, and the other half will leave our of boredom.

Website Home Page layout. The 'chapter headings' should be in a line across the header bar carrying your logo or if too plentiful should run vertically down the right hand side, as we read from the right. The chapter headings should be repeated at the bottom of the page and there should always be a 'Back to Top' facility because visitors are intolerant of scrolling and exit a website when frustrated.
The page should be wide rather than long so that the need to scroll is minimised.
The text should be columned in lines of up to ten words because reading full lines on a screen is difficult and visitors faced with difficulties exit sites.
The home page must have visual appeal and should, like a newspaper, provide human interest in the illustrations as well as the text.

The Home Page is the Hook. Writers are familiar with the need to hook a reader in the first line of hard copy writing and the same applies to the top of the home page. If by the end of the first paragraph the reader sees nothing to entice him to stay, he'll hit the back button and exit.

Make the Home Page Friendly. This doesn't just mean user friendly, with clear navigation routes, but make the home page look and sound friendly without reverting to sentences such as 'welcome to my website.' Fiction writers are practiced at giving their 'friendly' characters friendly voices and can employ this in writing the home page. Non-fiction writers should also have learnt how to pitch their narrative voice to appeal to readers. Use this skill to help keep visitors on your website as long as possible.

Put Photographs on the Home Page. These give the human interest that one expects on the front cover of a magazine or newspaper and entices viewers to stay on the website and discover more about the people in the photographs. Make sure that the photographs are of adequate quality and that the people in them look happy and are the sort of people your visitors would want to meet. Photographs demonstrate transparency and trustworthiness and boost the entertainment value. Even serious visitors such as writers want to be entertained during their visit.

Keep Writers Home Page Short, ideally not more than two screens deep because, and I can't say this often enough, visitors are intolerant of scrolling but love clicking. Don't forget to pepper the home page paragraphs with internal links.

Home Page Alone is Not Enough. Many authors/writing groups launch their website with little more than a home page. Such websites are overlooked/dismissed by search engines, denied directory listings and if by some miracle they do get some visitors, the visitors exit in disgust. To think that a home page is enough is like thinking a newspaper or book only warrants a cover page. The home page, like every other page, should have a minimum of four meaningful paragraphs.

Link the Home Page to Writing Tips. Visitors often arrive on a writers website to find writing tips that could help them improve their own writing. Ballea Writers Club website went to the top of search engine ranking as soon they put links to their writing tips and writing exercises on their home page. Amateur writers flock to a website that offers advice on writing and finding publishers. If writers give their visitors writing tips and writing exercises the visitors may stay around long enough to spend money or give the writer other positive feedback. But if a writer bombards them with salesman tactics from the onset and a payment gateway on the home page they'll exit the writers website abruptly.

Put an Email Link on the Home Page and every other page/section of your website. We have balleawriters@gmail.com distributed liberally throughout this website. Some writers websites just put a Contact link on their header bar but visitors can miss it there. As getting feedback is high on the list of reasons that writers have websites, I'd suggest putting the Contact link on the header bar and putting further links to the email address throughout the pages. Be sure that the email address from your website is unique to this purpose rather than your personal/generic email address. And writers should be sure to write replies to emails that come in through their websites.

Email to a Friend. Writers should put this facility on the top and bottom of reference pages in order to prompt their visitors to share what they've discovered on the writers website and promote the writers writing.

Define Font Sizes and Line Lengths. The font sizes should be defined in pixels, often 15 pixels, rather than left to default because writers want every computer to display the same image. The fonts that writers select for the home page should be held consistent throughout the other pages, just like a book.
Blocks of writing need to be defined in HTML tables so that their display remains consistent on different computers.

Don't Choke the Reader with Words. If the reader wanted long blocks of unbroken text he'd go to an encyclopaedia or other reference book rather than a writers website. Reading on a monitor is difficult and only a tiny minority of visitors will bother to print texts off to read them. Most people faced with blocks of words will exit a website. Limit horizontal lines of text to a maximum of ten words, use paragraph breaks liberally and allow for plenty of white space and graphics such as photographs and maps.

Is a Visual Sitemap Essential? A visual Sitemap is essential because it helps visitors navigate your website AND, as importantly, it helps the 'spiders' decipher what is on your writers website and feed this information to the indexers that log its available in accessible format for the worldwide search engines to respond to Internet searches. Without a visual sitemap a writers chances of getting a high search engine ranking is greatly impeded. A writers visual sitemap should be one of their 'chapters' and be accessible from the header bar on all the reference pages. The visual Sitemap is effectively the table of contents and to be effective should give an overview of each chapter rather than merely a list. Like the home page, the visual sitemap should be compiled for key phrase density.People get confused between a visual sitemap, the sitemap seen by visitors to the website, and the XML sitemap, the behind the scenes sitemap read by computers. The XML sitemap is equally important and shall be discussed later.

Internal Links to Writers Resources. The header bar, including the row of links to other folders on a writers website, should be displayed at the top of every page and this row of links should be duplicated at the bottom of every page. And every screen depth of every page should have a link to somewhere else on the website because visitors are more prone to exit than to scroll if they don't see a link. And long pages need a link to the top of the page, a 'back to top' facility on every screen depth. The pages that need the most internal links are the home page and sitemap, the first places where visitors and search engines look.
Internal links not only help visitors navigate but they are like cross stitches that bind a website together and lift it up the search engine rankings.

Back to Top. This facility should be available on every screen depth or people who feel stuck in the middle of a page will exit rather than scroll to look for another option. The back to top link is readily accessed at the end of paragraphs.

External Links to Writers Resources. External links peppered through your texts are counterproductive because they invite visitors to leave your site immediately by one of those links. External links should be grouped in a designated links page and/or listed at the end of specialist pages, like 'further reading' sections of books. External links help distinguish a writers website site as content rich.

Reciprocal Links to Other Writers. Reciprocal links are excellent for raising a writers website search engine ranking. Have a policy of exchanging links with writing related and respected websites such as those of publishers, agents, arts offices, writers directories, libraries, festival organisers, other authors, writing groups, writing clubs and writing circles. Set up lots of reciprocal links but don't use a links farm or your website will be blacklisted and dropped from search engines.

Website Notice Boards. I'm against having notice boards on writers' websites for two reasons. Firstly because they are high maintenance and secondly because webmasters get bombarded with prospective material, the selection of which opens the webmaster up to lobbying, criticism and a political minefield. The alternative is for writers to provide a links page where visitors can access the websites of groups such as arts councils and writing groups and avail of their notice boards.

What about A Blog Facility? My opinion is not to provide a blog arena on a writing club website because it can detract from the professionalism of the website and put an inordinate amount of work on the webmaster who needs to screen all the material before it goes up. And it can put the webmaster, usually a writing group committee member, in a difficult political situation because much of the stream of consciousness type of writing that can be submitted is poorly written, self-confessionary, overly emotional, offensive, ranting and otherwise unsuitable. Ballea Writers Club website provides links to blog sites rather than providing its own blog arena. If a writing group insist on having a blog I'd advise that they keep it hidden in a members sign-in section.

Sign In Facility for Writers. Many writers' websites have a Sign In box on the top left of the home page but I would strongly recommend against this as it can panic visitors into leaving the website. People think that signing in could: subject them to spam, give access to their bank accounts/medical records, lead to their contact details being passed on and their computer bombarded with viruses. And a sign in facility tells the visitor that he is not otherwise entitled to privileged information, it effectively snubs him. Sign in facilities are easy to hack past so writers' websites shouldn't have one unless they just want to reduce visibility of something relatively innocuous like a forum/blog rather than something as sensitive as accounts. If writers really want a sign in facility on their website they should put it somewhere discrete rather than on the top of the home page and not ask visitors for their email address as a compulsory element of the signing in.

Website Payment Gateways. There is little chance of writers selling anything through their websites, be they places at literary festivals, entry to literary competitions, books or writing critiques, if they don't register with a secure payment gateway. Writers should choose a payment gateway that most people will recognise and trust even if their charges are higher than an obscure resource because it's more profitable to get a reduced part of a large market than a large part of a reduced market.
Don't put the payment gateway at the top of the home page or people will flee the website like you'd tried to grab their wallet. Writers will get people to stay on their website longer and get more of them to purchase if the payment gateway is placed after a well written product description. Link other parts of your website to the product description rather than direct to the payment gateway. Peppering the payment gateway all over a website will drive visitors away.

What Does Content Rich Mean? A content rich website is a writers website that offers the visitor much more than 'brochureware' but offers useful writing related resources such as writing tips, writing exercises and links to other facilities such as writing competitions, literary festivals, magazines on writing, publishers and writers research resources .

What is a Dynamic Website? It is a website that changes over time to provide more resources. Writers' websites need to keep evolving to encourage repeat traffic. But many writers' websites are static or updated so rarely that they may as well be static.
Most writers website will need to be part programmed in a dynamic language such as PHP, used for the drop down lists in our publications folder. But a dynamic website usually refers to a website that includes animation features, something often outside the comfort zone of a writers primary audience and better avoided on writers websites

Websites With JavaScript and Flash. Flash should be avoided as it can slow down the users terminal and make the texts difficult for humans to read and impossible for search engines to read. JavaScript is outdated, open to security problems and should be avoided on writers' websites.

Pdf Files on Writers Websites. Writers should request original pdf files from their publishers where possible because these produce far superior website images to the pdf files compiled from scans. Its advisable for writers to set the size option of the display to 100% maximum rather than mounting on the default setting, where print can become overly enlarged and distorted. If the pdf comes from a large newspaper page that would be slow to display, its best to put the image into a facility such as photoshop and crop the extraneous sections before mounting.
Writers should remember to put their navigation bar on the pdf pages because visitors who arrive on a pdf page from an external link cannot readily access the rest of the writers website unless they are given the internal links.

Domain Names for Writers Websites. Writers should select a domain name that begins with the letters 'a' or 'b' or 'c' so that they come near the top of the alphabetical indexes used by many of the search engines. And the writers' domain name should contain at least one instantly recognisable and highly memorable keyword, for example, balleawriters, askaboutwriting, authorsites, bookfair or crimewriter.
Writers should avoid obscure writing related keywords such as inkwell or scribblers. And unless the writers' initials are famous like those of the BBC, initials won't boost their website traffic.
Underscores such as allea_writers_club are difficult to type and reduce traffic and the word 'club' can be mistakenly typed as 'group' or 'circle' and result in a 'page not found' message.
If the .com suffix is already taken its a mistake for writers to retain their chosen name and opt for a different suffix such as .net because people try .com first. The .com suffix is the most international so writers should adjust their domain name until they arrive at a domain name that is still available with the .com suffix. In some countries the regional suffix, like .co.uk can be cheaper than .com but writers need to check out the current prices because in Ireland the .ie suffix is ten times the price of .com and is less advantageous.
There is a mistaken belief that a long domain name can get one higher up the search engine ranking. This fallacy leads people to use 80 characters, the maximum allowed at .co.uk rather than staying within 22 characters, the maximum allowed at .com. Long domain names are even more difficult to remember than long book titles so their use is counterproductive.
Some writers try to cut the cost of a domain name by 'piggybacking' their website onto existing websites of other authors and writing clubs. Sub domains look unprofessional and are difficult websites to find.

Who Should Host a Writers Website? Writers can find plenty of free hosting and low budget hosting but such hosts should generally be avoided because they can be unreliable, their websites can be disproportionately slow, and provide restricted access for updating. Check that a prospective hosting company has server specs that are compatible with your requirements and check the speed of some of the websites that it hosts. Commercial hosting is quoted on the size of the site and volume of traffic. It's a good idea to seek a recommendation from a knowledgeable friend or colleague, much as you would when looking for a plumber.

Writing Regular Updates. Ballea Writers Club website is updated every fortnight. The updates include acquisitions to the Bookshelf, more photographs, members' publications, links and more writing tips and writing exercises. If the website weren't updated regularly there would be little reason for our own writing club members never mind visitors to keep returning. Don't forget to remove redundant material. Writers website updates need to be budgeted for from the outset. Writers should update the home page at least every two months because this encourages the robots to repeat the indexing of your pages and raise your writers website ranking.

How Much Management is Needed? Apart from updates, mentioned above, the writers website needs regular maintenance checks to make sure that all the links are still valid/active. There is little that annoys a visitor more than clicking on a link and being faced with notice denoting that the page is unavailable. Dead links must be removed and links that are temporarily out of order should be denoted in pale grey.
The speed is another thing to check because visitors won't wait more than ten seconds for a page to load. Reducing the resolution and defining the size of the fields can increase the speed in graphics sections.

Give Every Page a Meaningful Name. Many search engines index the names/titles of the pages and rank them accordingly so 'Home Page' is a nebulous name for this purpose whereas 'Home Page of Ballea Writers Club Ireland' gives the search engines what the writing group would like them to index and provides a meaningful display for the web browsers window.

What are Keywords for Writers? Keywords for writers are individual writing related words that writers 'plant' on all their reference pages, especially their home page and sitemap, in high density so that the search engines 'know' what the writer is writing about and can index writers accurately and respond to their writing related searches. The keywords are the words that writers would expect a writing related visitor to type into the search box. Companies charge large fees for compiling lists of keywords but writers can compile commonsense writing related keywords themselves and/or use free online keyword tools such as wordtracker.
At least one of your keywords should be the writers country, county or town because most people define their searches this way. Keywords for writers would include things like: writing, writer, author, scriptwriter, screenwriter, novel, story, poetry, poet and poem. Combined words such as scriptwriter are excellent because they give you two writing related chances in one.
It is better for writers to select five keywords for each page and use them in high density rather than selecting dozens of keywords and using them sparingly and indiscriminate of the individual page contents. Don't overdo the density of keywords or put them in meaningless strings rather than proper sentences or the search engine could reject your contents as spam.
If you put Writers Club Ireland into a search engine you'll see Ballea Writers Club Ireland on the first page and if you click on cached, our keywords for that search will be highlighted. Do the same with other writing related services with high search engine ranking and you'll quickly see keywords that work in lifting search engine ranking.

What are Keyphrases for Writers? They are meaningful strings of two or more keywords such as: writing club, crime writers group, or poetry writing critique. The search engines give added credit to keyphrases when calculating ranking so writers should tinker with their texts, particularly their home page and sitemap, until their texts are dense in keyphrases containing keywords. Writers shouldn't bother to try a top ranking keyphrase such as 'writers strike' in the hope of drawing traffic on a keyprase used by thousands of websites because you might persevere and find your writers website listed on page 100 but nobody else will bother to go that far to find you. It's easier for writers to get a higher ranking and higher hit rate on a lesser-used keyphrases such as 'writing critique' than a common keyphrase such as 'romance writer.'
Put your keyphrases in both singular and plural format as not all search engines make the adjustment. Some Search engine optimization tips, SEO tips, suggest mixing English and American spellings and using common misspellings. Doing this liberally throughout your website could be acceptable if one was promoting something such as confectionary or cars but overuse is inappropriate when writers are promoting writing. Be selective about such tactics e.g. Ballea Writers Club dropped the apostrophe on writers' for search engine ranking purposes, spell optimization with a z sometimes and with an s as optimisation other times and display key phrases and keyphrases.

What are Meta Tag Descriptions? These are descriptions, including keywords and keyphrases, that many search engines display with a search result. If you don't bother to provide the search engine with specific meta tag descriptions for each page the phrases will be selected from your pages at random. Your meta tags for each page should be around 200 characters and be human readable. The meta tags for the present page could be:
<meta name="description" content="Search Engine Optimization Tips, SEO Tips for Writing Writers Websites, Writers Websites on Top, Includes Tips on Design, Writing, Ranking and Management of Writers Websites, from Ballea Writers Club Ireland">
Note that the above example contains the primary keywords used on this page; writers, writing, tips and websites, keyprases such as writers websites, and includes our location. And the keywords are manipulated to maximise their density within a meaningful, though somewhat repetitive, sentence.
Writers should supply the meta tags to their programmer in ready to cut and paste format.

What are Meta Tag Keywords? These are lists of your keywords that, like your titles and meta tag description, go within the head area of your web page. The list should be about 400 characters and words can be repeated up to five times and further word density achieved by using plurals, extended words and synonyms. An example for a writers club page could be:
<meta name="keywords" content=" writers club, Cork, Ireland, writers tips and writers exercises, writing tips on short story, writing tips on writing writers websites, authors group, writers of literary stories, novels, poetry, journals, plays, biography, autobiography, essays, articles, columns for magazines and newspapers, scriptwriters, editors, publishers, writers of fiction genres, crime, historical, travel, thriller, mystery, suspense, horror, war, romance and chick lit writers">

Check Your Writing Meta Tags. Select a writers website with similar content to yours and a high search engine ranking, bring it up on your screen, take your mouse up to Pages, in the top left hand corner of your toolbar, click on view source, read their programming and check your provisional meta tags list against theirs.

Formatting a Set of Meta Tags. Make sure that your page name, meta tags description and meta tags keywords relate to your page and compliment each other for word density. Then put your page name, meta tags description and meta tags keywords within the head of your web page as follows:
<head>
<title> ............................................................................</title>
<meta name="description" content="...................................">
<meta name="keywords" content=".....................................">
</head>

XML Sitemap for Writers. The purpose of this is four fold: to tell the search engine the URL address (Uniform Resource Locator) of each of your pages, to prioritise your pages (maybe giving your writers home page 1.0, your writing tips and writing exercise 0.9 and your writers club history 0.5) and to tell the search engine when each page was last modified and how often you update each page, so that your updates get trawled and logged with expedience.
Further help with XML sitemaps is provided in the 'Webmaster Resources' section of our links page.

Never Frustrate a Visitor. Writers shouldn't try to draw visitors to their website with meta tags that are not supported by the content of their reference pages. Writers that do this annoy their visitors, sometimes to a point of lodging a complaint and getting the writers website blacklisted from search engines.

Spelling and Grammar Checks. Writers should print their pages and proof them in hard copy and get their writing associates to also proof them in hard copy before the website is launched. Writers ability to proofread accurately is greatly enhanced by hard copy display. Spelling and grammar checks should apply to all websites but are even more important on writers websites.

HTML Validity Check. Nearly all websites have errors in HTML language and while the pages can often seem to work fine with these errors, these HTML errors can cause search engines to bypass your pages. Run a HTML validity check by submitting your website codes to one of the free facilities, and correct your HTML errors before you launch your writers website.

Check for Websafe Colours. There are only 216 colours that are considered websafe i.e. dsplay the same colour on different browsers. Some applications save to 'web-safe' colours but its wise to access a website colour chart and select your colour densities from those displayed on the free supports. Writers should avoid dark colours, clashing or garish colour combination and colour contrasts that straddle colour-blindness zones such as red and green.

Automated Submissions. An abundance of the companies on the net who charge for automating search engine and directory submissions, possibly with a few free ones as starters, won't get writers up the relevant search engine rankings and may, through using banned devises like link farms, get a writers website blacklisted and/or listed indiscriminately in non writing related places. Some automated submission services increase their revenue by scamming webmasters into having their website resubmitted to every location every few months. Resubmissions are a waste of resources and may get your website blacklisted. When a writers website is indexed it will remain in the indexes for as long as the website remains operative and its content remain reputable.

Manual Submissions. Most search engines and reputable directories will not accept automated submissions so writers need to be prepared to put time and effort into making manual submissions of their writers websites. Be sure to use the full URL with the http:// prefix.

Compiling a Submissions List. Most writers may think of Google, Yahoo, MSN, Lycos, Aol, Ask Jeeves and a few others. Some major search engines such as Google have regional versions that could also be appropriate. And there will be search engines specific to your region e.g. Ireland has several search engines, and there will be industry specific search engines as well as writing related directories. Enter searches for things like: search engines, search engines Ireland, web directories, URL submission lists for writers, writing group directories, and select a couple of dozen that best suit your needs. The appropriate submissions, including Yahoo, are free of charge for non-profit websites.

Formatting Submissions. Be careful to write each search engine/directory submission to the correct specs e.g. some will allow longer descriptions than others and it is lost opportunity to submit a 100 character description to a resource that allows a writer to write more description. The categories available on each index will differ so be careful that each submission is sent to the most appropriate category, e.g. a writing group website could be better listed in the writing circles section of Wikipedia than in the literature section.

Check Your Website listings. Writers can go to the home page of a search engine and put site: followed by their website address in the search box and see what parts of their website are listed. If a writer clicks the 'cached' link under the listing of one of their pages they will see the date that the web page was indexed/its index was updated.

Webmasters Resources. Links to Wikipedia, wordtracker, visibone, sitemaps etc are in the 'Webmaster Resources' section of our links page

Copyright© 2008 Elaine Rhys-Davies of Ballea Writers Club Ireland. All Rights Reserved.
Elaine Rhys-Davies and Ballea Writers Club Ireland can be contacted through balleawriters@gmail.com
Ballea Writers Club Ireland, c/o Ballea Castle, Carrigaline, Co.Cork, Ireland

Ballea Writers Club Ireland - Writing Tips & Writing Exercises