All right! A little behind schedule, we’re digging into the website reviews. Ted will get to the visual side of the reviews ASAP, but I want to get these reviews up even sooner than possible (ESTP?). And we’re starting with one of my fellow crusaders, Sierra Gardner!

Hi, Sierra! Since I’ve subscribed to your blog for almost four months now, I’m familiar with some of your great content already. Highlighting that content can be a challenge for all bloggers, but I can see you’re working very hard to do just that. We’ll also look at your future marketing efforts, since you’re not pursuing an agent or a book deal yet.

Content and navigation
I’m always happy to find an About page quickly and easily on a new blog. Your bio is cute and personable. You might consider using the sidebar widget version of “About Me” in addition to the page, so we get some idea of the face behind the blog without having to dig deeper.

Also, you might consider breaking contact me into a separate page. If I came to your blog to contact you, I might not think to look on the about page for that info—and if I did, I’d still have to scroll down to find it.

You’re working hard to highlight several types of content on your blog, and that’s great. You’ve got a page that lists writing samples you’ve shared as well as one for your favorite posts. Both of these are great ideas. You might be able to make these pages work even harder for you by sharing a short summary or synopsis of the post or sample to encourage clickthroughs. On your writing samples page, at the very least an indicator of the genre could help entice readers to click. The favorite posts page might also benefit from a sentence or two of description to hook your readers.

The Submissions page is a little bit confusing, especially on a writing blog since we’re used to seeing submissions on only agent and publisher sites. While the name is appropriate, a title like maybe Guest Posts & Questions might help, too. If you have any examples of either type of submissions, maybe list & link to them underneath.

You might also consider moving the followers widget higher to highlight that feature of your site and encourage people to follow your blog. Generally, the archive isn’t the best thing to have first in your sidebar—it doesn’t ask your readers to engage or take further action as effectively as subscribe buttons, a Followers widget, social media buttons or even your bio. Show your readers how to

Search engine visibility
On Google, your blog comes up third for your name. Your LinkedIn profile is fourth. There are a couple Facebook profiles, but they’re not yours. In Bing/Yahoo, your LinkedIn is first, but your blog doesn’t show up in the top 10 results—although your Blogger User Profile does. When you’re ready to begin the agent search, be sure to include your name prominently on your site, and get links using your name as the link back at your site (such as from guest posts). If possible, it might be good to move your blog to sierragardner.blogspot.com (or better yet use Blogger’s Custom Domain feature to put it at sierragardner.com, sierragardnerauthor.com or blog.sierragardnerauthor.com).

Optimizing for your name does post some challenges. There are a lot of people out there named Sierra Gardner or Sierra Gardener, and there’s even some competition from the Riverside, CA, community of Sierra Gardens. However, it doesn’t look like anyone is actively trying to rank in search engines for your name, so a little bit of effort could pay off quickly and well.

I’m sure you come across this pretty often, but it might be difficult for readers to remember how to spell your name. (NO, I’ve never had that problem. Sigh.) You might think about also optimizing for Sierra Gardener so your site ranks high when people search for your name spelled incorrectly.

Sierra, thanks for sharing your site with us and good luck in all your writing and blogging efforts!

What do you think? How can you highlight the content in your blog better?

In case you missed it, Monday I did a guest post at Romance University about seven things an author’s website must be. I drew three lucky websites from the comments that day and today RU has posted my critiques on their content, navigation, networking, promotion, design, and search engine presence.

There is a lot of information over there, including quick tips on what to put on your site, how to increase our search engine rankings, and how to promote (or prepare to promote) your books on your site. Check it out!

I used to do author website critiques here from time to time, and it’s been almost a year and a half since our last round. And because I seem to need a little extra motivation these days, I’ll do it as a challenge to myself: if I finish my rewrites by May 25, we’ll do a quick series of (aspiring) author website critiques here!

In the meantime, check out my series on aspiring author websites (also available in PDF)!

A little about me
I do actually know what I’m talking about. I worked in Internet marketing for five years, specializing in organic search engine marketing and industry news. Until I left to have baby #3, I was the editor of the prominent Internet marketing news blog Marketing Pilgrim, one of Advertising Age’s Top 10 Internet Marketing Blogs. I’ve spoken at (and otherwise attended) several industry conferences and might even be called an “expert.” But I’m way too modest for that .

What do you think? What kind of feedback would you want on your website?

It’s that time again! Kathleen MacIver of KatieDid Design and I, Jordan McCollum of Marketing Pilgrim (and, of course, this website), are looking for volunteers to have your aspiring author website reviewed by two professionals!

If you’ll recall, we did a series of aspiring author website reviews in August and September. The series was so well received that Katie and I decided to do it again!

This time, because of the holidays and the like, we’ll be limiting the number of sites we can review. The reviews will run in December.

To sign up for one of the very limited slots, leave a comment on this post! Be sure to include the URL of your website in the URL box provided. If comments are closed, all the slots are full (but we’ll do this again in the future!).

Can’t wait until December? The free Guide to Aspiring Author Websites PDF from our last series is still available!

Photo by Sean Dreilinger

Is it just me, or did Saturday totally sneak up on you?

Sorry about the delay, folks. As promised, I’ve compiled the articles and advice from our aspiring author website series and website reviews into a free PDF guide.

The free Guide to Aspiring Author Websites was a bit of a challenge. Rather than including the full reviews, which are most useful to the person who received them, I’ve assembled all the advice that Kathleen and I gave into a little more general format, to apply to anyone who reads it.

The series was more popular than we’d anticipated, so we’ll be doing it again sometime soon. That’s right, we’ll be reviewing more websites. Don’t forget to subscribe to the blog to so you don’t miss the call for volunteers! Thanks to all of our brave and gracious volunteers, and thanks to everyone who commented and enjoyed our series.

Next week, we’re going to start looking at plotting methods.

Cover photo by Ben Lancaster

Today we have our final website review for La Belette Rouge: oh, the luxuries of going last. Have you been reading and making adjustments all along? Cheater .

(Remember, we’ll be doing more website reviews in a few months, so subscribe so you don’t miss the call for volunteers!)

Kathleen’s comments

Dear ‘Belette Rouge,’

I visited your site and I was . . . intrigued. It seems that you have a pretty wide circle of friends online, and that’s a good thing! The number of comments your posts bring shows that you’re doing something right.

But to be quite honest, I’m not sure what to review! I see from the series down on the left that you have blogged on writing . . . but that doesn’t seem to be the focus at present. Without reading the whole blog, I don’t know what you write, to know if it’s something I’m interested in. I’m not sure what the focus of the blog is, to know if it’s something I might like to subscribe to. I don’t know what “Belette” means, so that doesn’t give me any hints.

I’ll ask you the same thing I asked a few other blog owners . . . what is the purpose of your site? What is your goal? If yours is community (which you seem to be doing excellent at fostering), then I think your community would attract new participants more easily if your site clearly states what your community revolves around.

Give the site a clear blog description, and put something at the top of your sidebar, or above the posts that explains it a little more. [Also, a tag line displayed as part of the header can be a great help for quickly letting visitors know what your blog's all about—Jordan.] You might find new readership builds much faster!

I’ll be offline for most of next week, but if you’ve got a specific question, go ahead and ask it in the comments and I’ll reply when I’m back online.

Happy blogging!

-Kathleen MacIver / KatieDid Design

Jordan’s comments

Pages

Your blog is another example of a “lifestyle” blog, where you blog about your daily experiences from the mundane to the therapeutic. You have a great voice and wonderful humor that comes through in every post.

However, while you have a series on life as a writer, you don’t highlight any WIPs or works prominently on your blog.

There may be a good reason for this. If you’re purposefully blogging under a pseudonym, and you want it keep it that way, you may want to keep potential publication info away from your site so you don’t get your real name associated with your site. (Then again, maybe you should be writing under a pseudonym, too.)

But if you don’t have that aversion, you might consider featuring your works more prominently.

I might also suggest a menu bar—a single line of text underneath the header that links to the permanent features of your site. This is where you can put links to your About page, a page about your WIPs and writing credits, and possibly pages on the various areas of your site—writing, infertility, Francophilia, etc.

Sidebars

The top two elements in your sidebar are encouraging visitors to subscribe—nicely done. I might add a little explanation (or a link to an explanatory post) in the first Subscribe widget (if possible), so people know what it means to subscribe—something you do well for the email subscription link.

Your contact information is fairly prominent on each page, as the third element in the sidebar. However, because your header image is so long, that contact information is below the fold. I’m torn over whether that’s enough. But it’s good that you offer several different ways to connect with you.

Also, your sidebar is quite long. I really like that you’ve been highly selective about what badges and honors to display. However, there are still a lot of links there. When visitors come across a long list of links, their eyes are likely to gloss over—they can’t focus on any single link, so they don’t bother looking at any of them. (A lot of links on a single page may also dilute the value you’re passing along to the sites you link to, in search engines’ eyes.)

If you want to make the links in your sidebar stand out more, you might consider having fewer of them. Don’t worry, I’m not saying you should just ditch links to your favorite blogs—but over 200 links on the main page is kind of a lot to handle. Instead, you could consider a single post, linked in your side bar or menu bar, for all your favorite links/blog roll. You can still use the same headings and divisions on the page, too.

Your own search engine presence, however, is fantastic. Your blog is #1 for [belette rouge] on Yahoo, Google and Bing (and also #2 on Yahoo and Google and #3 on Bing). The rest of the top ten results are all about you—your Facebook profile, your blog on various blog sites, friends’ mentions of your blog.

And obviously, with that many followers and that kind of discussion on each post, you have a fantastic community on your blog.

What do you think? Would you rather have a popular community on a lifestyle blog under a pseudonym where you wouldn’t want to promote your writing, or an author website with your real (or publishing) name?

Photo credits: question—Svilen Mushkatov; no pictures, please—StillSearc; glassy eye—Michelle Mangum