4 must-have tools for better author SEO

Here’s what I like the most about being a conference speaker: I can attend sessions presented by others and learn from some really fabulous presenters.

I spoke about e-book publicity at BlogPaws, the conference for pet bloggers, earlier this month. While there, I sat in on a workshop on search engine optimization – SEO – led by Matt Beswick. He shared a few tips and tools for better author SEO that I found helpful and thought you might, too. Here they are.

1. Ubersuggest.org

This keyword suggestion tool helps you generate blog post or article topics that are based on keywords people are searching for.  Use the instructions on the left side of the screen to generate keywords, select the ones that appeal to you, and add them to your “basket.” When they’re in the basket, you can copy and paste them into Google’s Adwords search tool to see how many people are searching for each of them.

Beswick suggests starting with a couple of words to see what the software brings up for you. You’ll see in his example on the left that typing “what dogs”  into the search box generates a handy list of keywords that can be the start of blog posts or phrases to work into a site’s content.

2. WordPress SEO by Yoast

If you have a WordPress site, check out this plugin that will help you increase your search engine ranking but also increase the click through on organic search results. It does this in part by showing whether your title is too long or too short and if your meta description makes sense in the context of a search result. (My webmaster highly recommends it, too.)

3. Majestic SEO

Use Majestic to find all links pointing to your site, then check for “orphaned links” — those that take you nowhere and generate an error message. Redirect the orphaned links to valid and relevant pages. (This is important because orphaned links hurt your search engine ranking.) Learn more at this blog post, “Finding & Fixing Orphaned Links Using Majestic, Excel & Screaming Frog.”

4. Piktochart

Beswick (and so many others) recommends creating awesome, cool content that others want to share. Infographics are popular and shareable (check out Jane Friedman’s infographic on the five current book publishing options that I’ve seen shared on a few other sites). Piktochart will help you create those cool infographics so many of us love. I’m thinking about my first infographic and will see if Piktochart is the tool I need for it.

Thanks, Matt, for these helpful author SEO tools!

Let’s show a little love to Matt Beswick, who gave an excellent presentation (check it out on SlideShare). Thanks, Matt! Please follow him on Twitter (@MattBeswick) and send him a thank you note there.

What’s your favorite author website SEO tool? Please share it in a comment!