Journal - Meta Tags

I’ve still been spending a pretty big majority of my time working on “Audio Book Heaven.” I wanted to post new book reviews every other day throughout the month of May, and it looks like that will be no problem. I had quite a few short audio books on hand, books that I can complete in a couple of days. Still, it’s been a bit of a scramble writing reviews and getting them posted.

I’ve also been doing a lot of work on my older reviews, revising them slightly and re-posting them. I’m trying to optimize the whole thing so that it will show up on search engines. That means adding relevant keywords like "audio book" and “book review", as well as using the book title and author name. To get good results, I need to use those important keywords several times in each review so that's why I'm revising them. While I’m revising the old reviews, I’m also adding my affiliate links for Audible and Amazon. I had about fifty book reviews posted before I started all this so the revision process has been kind of tedious. I’m making good progress though, and I guess I’m more than halfway done. I’m hoping to have all that done by the end of May.

In addition to all that, I’ve been looking at some different ways to increase traffic to my blog. The best way to do that is to make sure it shows up in search engines like Google. When someone goes to Google looking for audio book reviews, I want them to find me. The best way to get in the search engines, is to have good meta tags.

Meta tags are part of the actual html code of your website, and they are what search engines look at to tell them what your site is all about. The tags would include the title of your site, plus relevant keywords. The keywords for my blog would be things like “audio book” and the others I mentioned above. It works best if the keywords you choose actually show up frequently in your website’s content, so that’s why I needed to do all that revising; I am mainly adding more relevant keywords to my book reviews.

So anyway, I found some instructions on how to add the meta tags to the code of my blog and gave it a try. It turned out to be pretty easy to add the code, but I didn’t really know if I had done it correctly.

Luckily, the instructions I found, also provided a link to an online meta tag checker. That’s exactly what it does, it checks your meta tags to make sure they don’t have errors and to make sure they have good relevancy to your content. So I ran the checker and my tags were entered correctly, and it said the relevancy was good also. Very good in fact, so I was happy about that.

The stat counter I put on my blog a few weeks ago is working well. I’ve been getting a small handful of hits every day, usually around 3 or 4 which is about what I expected to start with. One day I got a whopping eighteen which surprised me. Of course, I hope those numbers will gradually grow as I complete more work on the blog.

So I’ve been busy, this has turned out to be quite a project. I’ve been staying up pretty late every night working on it andI’m starting to feel a bit exhausted. That’s probably why I was sick last week. I don’t mind though. For the last year and a half I’ve just been drifting and it feels good to actually be working on something again. And if I end up making a little money off the thing, then I guess that’s okay too. I’ll have to give a share of it to God though since He is the one who gave me the sharp mind I needed to figure all this out.

1 Peter 4:10 Each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God's grace in its various forms.

Mark 12:17 Then Jesus said to them, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's.” And they were amazed at him.

Journal - Almost There

Sooo, what’s been going on over at “Audio Book Heaven?” I’m glad you asked!

Ro confirmed for me that the counter is working. That was pretty exciting because I didn’t think I'd ever get it. At StatCounter.com they provide you with some raw html code and you have to copy it and paste it into your website to create the counter. I was having a lot of trouble figuring out exactly where the code started and ended and that’s why I had so much trouble getting the counter to work. At Amazon's affiliate website, when they provide html code for you, there's a button right below it. When you click the button, it automatically highlights the code and copies it to the clipboard. That is so much easier! I sent a message to Stat Counter and told them they should consider adding a feature like that.

Speaking of Amazon, I’ve got their affiliate program figured out and I’ve started putting the links in my book reviews. They have a system where you can look up a specific product on Amazon and they will generate the code that will link directly to that item. So on each of my book reviews, there will be a link directly to that book at Amazon if anyone wants to click over and buy it. I originally envisioned a generic link so that I could just copy the same link on each book review. That would have been a lot easier, but those links only come in banner form. I’m not really sure if screen readers can manage banner ads or not so I decided against that. The individual product links come in plain text form that screen readers will have no problem with.

I’m still having a little trouble with Audible. I actually have a generic link set up, but I want to do product links just like with Amazon. For some reason it's not working, though. I've been emailing back and forth with their help desk to see if we can figure out why. I’m using the generic links for now, but I hope to get the product links working soon.

I looked around at the ABE Books affiliate page, but I had a really hard time navigating their pages so I decided to drop that one. They're just not set up very well for screen readers.

So that’s about it. Everything is up and running, I just have a few little details to iron out. I’ve set myself a goal of publishing a new book review on every odd-numbered day throughout the month of May. I'll have to scramble a little, but I think I can do it. Stay tuned!

Psalms 42:11 Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.