SEO Basics: Not My Problem

If you are a fellow webcomics creator and believe that SEO is not your problem, think again. Here are a few myths, guidelines and  SEO Basics. You’ll see how easy it is to get started optimizing your content for search engines in the WordPress world.

Why Should I Care?

A recent switch to the great WordPress SEO Plug-In by Yoast, has roughly doubled the traffic to this site on weekends. If that doesn’t grab you, nothing will.

Not only is there a great tutorial, but the plug-in is fundamentally simple – and even fun – to use.

It’s Too Late

Conventional wisdom dictates that in an ideal world, SEO is part of our planning process prior to launch. Last time I looked, we don’t live in an ideal world. If you do, please send me an invite!

If you feel that your site is not getting you the traffic from Google it should get organically, the difference is compelling enough. It is far better to retroactively tweak some of your text content than to ignore SEO optimization.

What Should I Do Differently?

Write more. Write more text. The images we use in our comics are not indexable to search engines. While we can try the Excerpts features, that doesn’t work well at describing the content since the dialogue we write is not the likely keywords searchers are choosing, We have to write more descriptively in our blog posts. Some of my favorite comics (and I’m guilty of this) put nothing in the accomanying posts since we likely feel the comic says it all – that’s the fundamental problem.

Spend the time to blog along with your comics, and be disciplined about it. I am a little too immersed in this and re-writing history by going through my Archive. I’m not suggesting that, but we can correct our SEO habits going forward.