The best author websites are the ones that sell books online. In order to sell books online, an author’s website MUST be able to be indexed in the search engines. When a website is properly indexed, it can be found by the millions of people searching the web each day.

I had a client who chose to publish her book through a self publishing POD company. She chose this company because of the promises they made to her. She was impressed by the company’s person approach. She was thrilled at the amount of time her rep was willing to spend talking with her on the phone. However , after a few hours of discussion, she began to feel uneasy because her author rep was pushing the publishing company’s $3000 “search engine optimized” website as an addition to her publishing package.

See, she already HAD a website (a self hosted Wordpress blog), but the rep kept telling her that her current site wasn’t as “good” as what they offered. The rep was adamant that if she wanted to sell copies of her book online that she needed their SEO website package.

After a lot of strong arming, this client contacted me, in a panic. Had I “sold” her an inferior web presence?

I asked her to send me examples of her publisher’s “best” websites for authors. She sent me a list of 5 websites, 4 of which were beautifully designed websites.

To the untrained eye, these websites were quite nice. However, as a web professional, I judge the “beauty” of a website by the number of visitors it attracts. Lots of visitors means lots of opportunities to sell books online so the best author websites are in fact those that are easy for the search engines to find and index.

Whether a website is easily indexed is not easy to discern without digging into the code. There are a lot of coding errors which can prevent a site from being indexed. The easiest way to determine if a site is properly coded is to check its performance when it comes to traffic. A website that isn’t getting ANY traffic isn’t properly set up, pure and simple.

I have several plug ins installed in my web browser which help me to “spy” on the performance of any website. One of those plug ins is a tool called the Alexa toolbar. Another plug in measures the Page Rank of a given website. (Page Rank is how important Google thinks this particular website is in the grand scheme of things.)

So, I began visiting the 5 sites this client sent.

Before we begin, I need to review two terms which are ESSENTIAL in understanding the analysis below.

The first term you need to know is PR = Page Rank. Page Rank is what google thinks of a website. 0 means Google either doesn’t know the website exists, has placed the website on “hold (aka placed in in the “sandbox), OR thinks the site is garbage. A PR 10 is perfection and so far, only only a select few websites have earned this distinction. (The list includes a lot of Adobe, Apple and Google sites)

In a nutshell, the higher the PR is, the better. Most “small” websites (less than 100 pages) will never rise above a 4 on this scale.

Alexa rank is a ranking of all the websites on the web from best to worst. 1 is best, 12 Million is worst. According to Alexa, Yahoo ranks “1″ while Google ranks “2″ and YouTube ranks “3″.

My client’s website: PR= 0 (Her site is VERY new and is still in the sandbox.)
My client’s website Alexa Rank: 965,618
(She has broken into the top 1,000,000 with less than 20 posts. THAT IS OUTSTANDING!!!)

First website from publisher:
PR = 0 (this site might be very new and still in the sandbox but this could also because they don’t have the proper coding to get it “aged”)
Alexa Rank: 11,697,259

(Remember, 1 is good, 12 Million is like Antarctica in the middle of winter!)

Second website from publisher:
PR=0 (this site might be very new as well and still in the sandbox.  However, this could also because they don’t have the proper coding to get it indexed and “aged”.)
Alexa Rank: 10,204,423

(Again, 1 is good, 12 Million is like the middle of Antarctica in the middle of winter!)

Third website from publisher:

Gives a “FORBIDDEN” message
this means the site isn’t set up properly to display.

Fourth website from publisher:
PR = 0 (see comment above)
Alexa Rank:1,487,662
(This one is the closest in traffic to my client’s.)

Fifth website from publisher:
PR=3 My spy tools can’t find an age match or any record in the web archives for this. However, it’s the first and only site from this publisher that has a Page Rank.
Alexa Ranking: 2,627,204

As I looked at each website with the benefit of my “spy tools” I became enraged. The coding costs were $3000.. then, when the other “web site promotion tools” were added in, the package was in the $5000 range. $5000 for a website that looks good but isn’t getting ANY visitors.

The best author websites are those that get traffic.  A website with an Alexa ranking in the 10 Million range is getting very little traffic.

Websites are not a “set it and forget it” marketing device for authors.

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