Search engines and your author site
Start with the ceiling, because most advice on this subject pretends there is not one. Your site is not going to outrank the big retailers for the title of your book. Their pages have vastly more inbound links and years more history behind them, and your site has you. That is fine. A reader who searched your exact title has already decided to buy, and the shop they land in sells the book.
So the job is not to win searches the retailers already own. It is to win the handful of searches that are genuinely yours, and to be legible to a machine when someone goes looking.
No engine publishes its ranking rules, and anyone who tells you they know them is selling a service. Nothing below is a ranking theory. It is the short list of things that make a page easy to read, easy to link to and easy to index — the part you actually control.
What your site can win
Your own name. This is the one that matters. A reader finishes a paperback, types your name, and needs to land on you rather than a namesake, a rank-tracking site, or a page that scraped your listing. If your site does nothing else, it should own your name.
Your series name. A distinctive series name is close to uncontested, and it is what a reader remembers when they have forgotten which book they read.
Long-tail questions about your subject. Only if you write about it. "How much water does a sourdough starter need" is a question thousands of people type and no retailer answers well. That is a door into your site, and the person who walks through it did not know your book existed.
Everything else — your genre, your comparison titles, the general phrase describing what you write — belongs to publishers, retailers and review sites. Let them have it.
What matters on the page, in order
A specific title and a real description on every page. Not one title repeated across the site. The page for a novel should say the title, the series and the format; the description should be a sentence a human would read, because it is often what appears under the link. A page called "Home — Untitled" is invisible to a person scanning ten results.
One page per book, with its own address. Your site guide already argues this on selling grounds; the search reason is separate. One page listing eight books is one page, and it competes for nothing in particular. Eight pages each about one title are eight chances, and they give you something to link to from a newsletter, an ad or the back matter of another book. See The author website, reduced to what it needs.
The facts in plain text. Title, series and number, author name, format, page count, and where to buy — written as text on the page, not baked into the cover image or a graphic. Anything set in an image is, to an indexing machine, a picture of nothing.
Alt text on images. Describe the image: "Cover of The Salt Road, book two of the Marches series." That is both an accessibility requirement and the only thing a machine knows about the picture.
Speed, and a phone. A page that takes several seconds to appear on a phone loses readers before anything shows, and a reader who leaves is a reader who did not buy regardless of where you ranked.
Links from places that already exist. Your store author pages, your newsletter footer, your social profiles, your Goodreads profile, any interview or guest post. A new site with no inbound links is a room with no door. See Author profiles, and why they are worth an hour.
In the tools. The Cover Maker exports an ebook cover at 1600 × 2560 from the same design as your printed wrap, and Mockups renders the book as a physical object — so the images on your book pages are the cover a reader already recognizes, not a second version of it. Start your book → · about the tools
What matters less than people claim
Keyword density. Repeating "historical fiction author" eleven times does not help and reads badly. Say what the page is about once, in the title, and again naturally in the text, and stop.
Anything that treats the search engine as the audience. Hidden text, pages written for a crawler, link exchanges, spun copy of the same article under twenty addresses. These tactics have a poor history, they cost real time, and they are aimed at a reader who has no money.
The nonfiction opportunity
If your book teaches something, writing genuinely useful pages about that subject is the most productive thing you can do with a site. Not a diary — articles that answer a real question completely, the way a good chapter would.
This works because the person searching the question is, by definition, interested in the subject of your book. It is the same mechanism behind every publisher's guides section, including this one. It is slow, it rewards depth over volume, and a dozen good pages beat a hundred thin ones.
Fiction gets much less from this, and pretending otherwise wastes months. Your novel's readers are not searching for essays about it.
Housekeeping
One domain, one version. Pick www or no www, http or https, and make everything redirect to that one address. Two live copies of the same page split whatever credit either would have had.
No duplicate pages. Do not publish the same blurb at three addresses because three menu items needed a destination.
A sitemap. Most site builders generate one. It is a plain list of your pages, and it costs nothing to have.
Then leave it alone. Search results move slowly, and checking daily tells you nothing that checking monthly would not.
Make your book
The tools are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: How readers actually search for books · More: The author website, reduced to what it needs · Categories and keywords, without the folklore · Tracking what actually works