Short Story SEO: Mastering Title Tags and Meta Descriptions for Online Fiction

Standing out as a writer can feel like navigating a labyrinth. For authors of short stories, the challenge is even more pronounced. How do you ensure your story reaches its intended audience amidst all the digital noise? The answer lies in optimizing title tags and meta descriptions to enhance visibility and engagement. In this guide, we delve into the intricacies of Short Story SEO, equipping you with actionable tactics to elevate your online fiction to new heights.

Understanding Short Story SEO

At its core, Short Story SEO is about strategically crafting a description, title tags and meta descriptions to make your stories more discoverable on search engines. Most of your search results will land on your taxonomy, category, and tag pages, but setting up your short story to support those efforts is important.

Writing a Description of Your Short Story

The description is a blurb at the top of your page that is there to entice people to read the story.

The hardest part of doing SEO for a creative project is not wanting to spoil the creative process. Plus, a lot of the time, we are doing the work for someone else’s story and don’t even have that option. So, in this section I’m not going to tell you how to write a compelling description of a short story. Instead, I’ll just tell you what to include in that description.

Here we’ll use an example from a short story that we will be covering in this article, The Frozen Warrior by Lothar Tuppan.

The change we are going to make is small, but it allows us to put in some keywords and a few links that we couldn’t put in otherwise. Also, it allows us to link at the top of the page. Linking from the top of the page can be more effective.

I bolded the mention of the genre and the author to show where our links go. The genre would link to a category page for that genre, the authors name would link to the author’s bio.

Craft Compelling Titles Tags that Help Categorize

The title tag of your short story serves as its virtual storefront – the first impression that entices readers to click and delve deeper. But it also helps inform search engine of what category it is in. This, in turn, will help support your organizational pages such as categories and tags.

As you can see from our examples, what we are sacrificing sometimes in the information is the author’s name. We do this for two reasons. First, ultimatly a search engines goal is to collect data about people. The author will be well represented on the page, in the title tag and likly linked to on social media, their own bio, or their own site. Second, we are not trying to show up in search for the author’s name in this case, the author’s bios, etc. will take care of that. We are trying to support the category or the genre page. The reson behind this is when people are searching for a new short story by an unknow author, they are likely to search my genre.

Categorize further with Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions act as the enticing blurb in a search result driving people to click. It also help the search engine further understand what the page is about. Here we tend to want to put a enticing description of our short story, and while we should do that, it’s not the primary goal. The primary goal is to let people and search engines know what the page is. In a world of business landing pages and services and products, we need to be very clear about what our page is about.

Ready to Try Out Some Short Story SEO for Yourself?

Short Story SEO is indispensable for authors seeking to amplify their reach and impact. By honing your skills in crafting compelling title tags and meta descriptions that support your category or genre pages, you empower your stories to break through the chatter.