Today, we’re looking at the site of an author whose first book is due out in a few months: Daron Fraley. It’s time to get ready for promoting that book! (Also note: I posted the answers to yesterday’s quiz.)

Kathleen’s comments

Dear Daron,

I like the paper-looking background on your website. You’ve got a great author photo, too, which is a nice, personal touch. Your site is very simple, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

What would I suggest when you’re ready to make improvements? Well, the first issue is that your site doesn’t sell or advertise your book. It says it’s coming out soon, but the home page doesn’t say what it’s called, nor what genre it is, nor the publication date (and where it will be available), etc. You want to get all of this on your front page in an easily read and understood way. If the book will be available through Amazon, then as soon as a page is up for it, make sure you link to it!

Hopefully, the cover art is such that an image of it will show the genre…but even so, it would be great to have a catch phrase or mention of the genre up under your name on every page of your site.

Second, there are many different layouts and templates, etc. that could improve the site, but it’s hard to know what you would like. Therefore, I’ll mention improvements for THIS layout and look.

• How about a graphic that matches your genre? Back in the first series of website reviews that we did, (and which Jordan has created a PDF of) I talked about how you want your website to give the visitor the impression that they’ve stepped into the world of your books. I’m not sure what limitations your website account has, but anything that will move toward this goal will increase interest in your books.
• Right now all of your site content is shifted to the far left of your site, which makes it look a little lop-sided. If you can center the content section so the blank space to the right is split between the left and right, that will really help the pages look more balanced.
• The Study page should, I think, show the connection between the Bible studies and your story. As it is, I think I understand, but I have to look on two pages (the books page and the study page) to figure that out. That might confuse those who happen upon your Study page first (through Google). Instead, you want those who are googling these things and finding your page to instantly KNOW that you’ve written a book that they might find interesting!
• Your Find me page could be snazzed up a little by adding one of Twitter’s widgets there, so it shows your last number of Tweets. Take a look at my twitter page for an example. Twitter will walk you through getting the code.
• The blog template that you chose is gorgeous. If you can adjust the colors of your website images (and the solid color behind your text) to match the blog images better, that would help them fit together. Then see if whatever graphics you add to your site can also be added to your blog. At the very least, add a book cover image to the top of one of your sidebars.

I hope this helps, and God bless!

—Kathleen MacIver, KatieDid Design

Jordan’s comments

Hey Daron! As usual, Kathleen is spot-on. In the last series, I also had an article on how you can use your site to help promote your book, and there are a number of suggestions there, including the ones Kathleen made, excerpts, and trailers.

But since she covered that so well, I’m going to move on to more technical issues. Your search engine presence is good for your name—with a unique name, you should definitely rank well. However, your site itself is #4 on Google and Bing (#1 on Yahoo, though)—it could be better, and it’s competing against your blog (which is winning on Google).

I ran your site through a simulator to show what a search engine spider would see when looking at your site:

Spidered Text : Daron D. Fraley, Speculative Fiction Author

Spidered Links : No spiderable links found.

Meta Keywords : Daron D. Fraley, The Chronicles of Gan, The Thorn, speculative fiction, author, writer, adult books, Gan, Valor Publishing Group, Christian fiction, fiction, YA books, Daron D. Fraley, Daron Fraley, Daron, author Daron Fraley

Meta Description : No meta description found.

Thankfully, search engines are slightly smarter than this, and they have been able to index your site’s content. But the underlying problem here is that your site uses frames.

For those that don’t know, frames split out the content of a website into different “windows” or panes on a browser page. (Once upon a time, there were actual bars between the frames.) The actual code for the page only refers to the other files that have the actual content on them, adding an extra step for search engines.

Frames are also hard on users. For example, if I wanted to link directly to your Study page . . . well, I just couldn’t. When I go to the Study page, the URL in my browser is still “http://daronfraley.com.”

Rather advanced users of a web browser can still find the URL of your Study page by right-clicking on the navigation, but if we follow that URL, the page we come to has the top header of the site (the other “frame”) cut off.

The solution: it’d be really easy just to leave frames behind altogether and put the code for the header into the individual pages or the template for your site.

Also note, the meta description will serve you better than the meta keywords (which aren’t used by most search engines anymore—but the descriptions may be used as the snippet below the blue link on a search engine result page). Finally, links will help pull your rankings up. I also recommend hosting your blog on your domain (at blog.daronfraley.com), which can also help your link authority in search engine’s eyes.

As always, I also recommend having a way for site visitors to contact you directly, preferably a contact page with an email form. It’s great that you have the social media contacts, though, making sure that people can find you around the Internet (and your Twitter profile, Facebook profile and blog are prominent in the search engines, too).

Finally, I do want to tell you that you have great content on your site. It’s rare that an author has stuff on their site that could be truly useful (and at least somewhat related to their works) like your study helps. Sharing short stories also helps prospective readers to get a taste for your writing. It’ll just take a few tweaks to help your website better represent your book and work for you!

Hope that helps!

What do you think? How can authors promote their books on their sites? What authors have you seen doing this well?

Photo credit: excited reader—Chris Johnson