Writers, you want your website to be found by those looking for something like what you offer. So your website needs to contain a blog.
For Google to start noticing your blog, it must have regular new articles (two or three times a week is best; once a week is minimal but maybe OK). If this looks like a tall order to you, consider going together with another author or two and making a group blog.
Create pithy blog articles with catchy titles that people will find very useful and want to share with others. Then be sure to link to them from posts on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, encouraging others to share them. What you want most of all are inbound links, that is, where someone else links to your blog post. As you create a library of blog articles, each with some inbound links, your whole website will be lifted in the Google rankings. The more articles, the more links, the higher the Google ranking.
Note: in order for Google to put your blog content into the search engine listings, the blog entry must be original and not copied word-for-word elsewhere on the Web. Don’t write a book review on your blog, paste it into Amazon and Goodreads, and expect it to do you any good on your own site. Google will notice the duplicate content and decide which one to list, forgetting the rest. It will pick the site with the higher oomph, such as Amazon or Goodreads. No one will be able to find it on your site using Google. The solution? Share your blog reviews on Amazon or Goodreads by paraphrasing them and shortening them.
Next week: keywords for writers.