If a reader Googled your name right now, what would come up? An abandoned LinkedIn profile from a previous career? A neglected Goodreads page? An insurance agent in Albuquerque who happens to share your name?
There are at least three Thomas Umstattds in the world, and only one number-one spot on Google.
If you want that spot for your own name, and ideally for each of your book titles, you have to master search engine optimization (SEO). Your most powerful asset for ranking isn’t your Amazon page or your Goodreads profile. It’s your author website, the one piece of the internet you fully control.
To explain how authors can optimize their website for both Google and AI, I spoke with Jason Barnard, founder of Kalicube. A former professional musician and cartoon-maker turned digital marketing expert, Jason has spent more than a decade teaching Google and AI who people are. He’s the author of The Fundamentals of Brand Search for Business (affiliate link) and gives away his entire Kalicube Framework for free at JasonBarnard.com.
Here’s our conversation about ranking for your name, building an About page the machines can understand, and why you should never obsess over your website’s design at launch.
Which page does Google care about most?
Thomas: Let’s say I’ve just built my first author website with a homepage, an about page, a contact page, and an upcoming books page. It’s the platonic ideal of a simple author website. What’s the first thing I need to know about optimizing it for Google?
Jason: The first thing is not to overcomplicate it. These machines are getting pretty smart, so keep it simple. Don’t build many pages to try to change how they perceive you. Be precise and clear about the pages you already have. Start by auditing every page.
You need an about page that isn’t your homepage. On your homepage, state who you are, what you do, who you serve, and why people would enjoy your books.
Thomas: And write it in third person. Authors often make the mistake of writing in first person, saying, “I started writing when I was three years old,” and their name is nowhere on the about page. Maybe it’s in the graphic at the top, but it’s not in plain text.
Sometimes a homepage is written in first person, and an about page is written in third person. The result is that the about page outranks the homepage for the author’s own name.
You can write in first person on your blog, but your about page has to be in third person. It also makes it easier for journalists or even organizers to copy and paste into a podcast introduction, article, or speech.
Jason: AI and Google don’t understand “I.” They understand the name of the person, and from there they can figure out who he or she might be. You need to repeat the name throughout the page fairly regularly, and it feels a little uncomfortable.
You need an about page so you don’t have to repeat your name on your homepage, which is where the human beings should be landing.
Start the about page at the top with the most recent, most important information. Don’t start with “Jason Barnard was born in 1966” and work your way down. That’s a huge mistake. Start with what matters most to your readers and to the AI today.
Goodreads and Amazon profile pages matter, but they aren’t the primary source. They need to carry the same message as your about page.
Your about page is what we call the Entity Home. Google, Bing, and the AI look for that page from you, about you, on your own website to see what you say about yourself. Then they go around the web checking whether everyone else agrees. So make sure the pages you control, like your Facebook, LinkedIn, Amazon, and Goodreads pages, all agree with your about page.
Thomas: Opening with a short bio at the top is valuable. Some version of that short bio can live on your homepage too. You might include your photo and a sentence or two about you with a link to the full about page.
But on that full about page, do include your whole life story, born in 1965 and so on, particularly if you’ve worked more than one career.
Let’s say writing is your third career, and before that you were a teacher, and before that you served in the military. It’s easy for AI to think that military Joe, teacher Joe, and author Joe are three different people. A comprehensive bio in one place helps the AI connect them.
I know what you’re thinking. “I thought this was a search engine optimization episode.” Search engine optimization and AI are intermingling. They’re like peanut butter and chocolate. You do a Google search and get an AI result. You ask ChatGPT a question, and it runs a Google search. The arrows point both directions, and helping the machine understand who you are helps you across the board.
Does the AI know you, or does it have to look you up?
Jason: It’s important to remember that search is what we were all looking at with Google or Bing. Today I’d break it into three things: search engines, assistive engines, and agents, meaning AI agents that act on someone’s behalf. Here we’re interested in the assistive engines and the search engines.
Sometimes ChatGPT can answer off the top of its head. If you ask it about Napoleon Bonaparte, it doesn’t need to search the web to figure out who he was. If you ask it about Jason Barnard, same thing, because it already has the information.
If it doesn’t know who you are, or isn’t sure, it looks for the search results on Google or Bing. Microsoft Bing is more and more important, because many of these engines use Bing rather than Google.
Think of AI as a student. Sometimes the student can answer off the top of their head. Other times they have to look things up in the library. If the machine has to look you up in the library, you haven’t done a good enough job of helping it understand who you are, what you do, and exactly who you serve.
Thomas: If you want to know what ChatGPT knows about you without it looking you up in the library, I built some tools for that. In the Patron Toolbox, I have some AI Knowledge Checkers. They literally can’t run a search to check.
I get more negative feedback on these tools than any of the others, because the AI will hallucinate if it doesn’t know who you are. That’s a feature, not a bug. If the AI is hallucinating about you, it’s because it doesn’t know much about you.
People say, “The real ChatGPT gives a better answer than the ChatGPT in the Patron Toolbox.” Well, the real ChatGPT is running a Google search to refresh its memory, because it doesn’t know much about you. Ideally, ChatGPT, Grok, and Claude all know who you are accurately, without having to look you up.
To get there, you need a long chain of good search engine optimization on your website and on other websites. The more content there is about you on the internet, the more authoritative the AIs will be.
If you have a Wikipedia page, they’ll know whatever Wikipedia knows. But it takes a while to get notable enough to earn a Wikipedia page.
Should you gun for a Wikipedia page?
Jason: More isn’t necessarily better. Don’t just throw as much information out there as you can, because then you lose control and start contradicting yourself. If you change your brand narrative in a year or two, that’s much harder to reel back.
Wikipedia will always get you an amazing result across all these engines, but it isn’t for everybody. If you’re not famous enough that people would instinctively search your name in an encyclopedia, don’t try to create a Wikipedia page. You don’t deserve it yet, no offense, and you’ll get deleted. That’s worse than not having one at all.
Here’s why. You put the information in, it gets published, the machines see it, and then it gets deleted. That deletion is an explicit signal that it wasn’t true or trustworthy. Now you’re not back at square one; you’re at square minus one.
Wikipedia has about six million articles. Google’s Knowledge Graph, its own version of Wikipedia, has 54 billion entries. Google will understand 54 billion things when Wikipedia only presents six million. You don’t need Wikipedia to be in Google’s internal encyclopedia or ChatGPT’s.
The key is consistency and clarity of information across the web, not volume.
Every time you publish something, ask yourself, if I ever change my message, can I go back and change this, or will it create problems later?
You can get a Grokipedia page relatively easily, and the nice thing is that it writes the page from the open web and the information it already has. The trick is to go to Grok and search your name alongside another entity closely related to you that it already has a page for.
To create mine, I searched for Jason Barnard and Kate Westbrook, who’s my mother. Then Jason Barnard and Disney, because I work with Disney. Then my book, The Fundamentals of Brand Search for Business. I ran a series of searches to guide it toward who I am and who I have relationships with. After a couple of days, it created the page because I’d named enough related entities.
You do it as a user. You don’t need to be logged in. It creates the page if it feels you deserve it, and if you don’t deserve it, you need to work to deserve it.
What was interesting is that it wrote a 2,000-word essay about me, and it was perfect. It wrote it better than I had written it. If I could change three of those 2,000 words, I might, but I probably wouldn’t. That’s because my brand narrative over the last 15 or 20 years has been clear and consistent across the entire internet. That’s what you’re looking for.
Is there an easier alternative to Wikipedia?
Thomas: I like Grokipedia, and it doesn’t just influence Grok. Claude is known to source Grok for answers too. I’m not sure about ChatGPT.
I have a policy when I write blog posts to link to Grokipedia over Wikipedia, because I’m finding the Grokipedia articles are the same quality or higher. Some of them are just the Wikipedia article copied.
I’ve helped authors get on Wikipedia in the past, and by the time you can get on Wikipedia, you don’t need it. Wikipedia looks at The New York Times, USA Today, and major publications from major media outlets. Its whole worldview is that if the mainstream media says it, it’s true. Look at the works cited at the bottom of any Wikipedia page, and you’ll almost always see major media outlets.
All the search engines and AIs train on those major media outlets. By the time you’re on Wikipedia, it’s basically a synthesis of all your other PR. It’s a reward for doing a good job with PR. If you’re not already getting puff pieces from major media, Wikipedia will delete your page.
That’s why I love getting a Grokipedia page instead. For AI optimization, it’s helpful.
Jason: With Grokipedia, the key is to search for yourself alongside entities that make sense for who you are today, because that guides how it writes the page. But be careful, because once it’s done, you can’t easily change it. Before you move forward with Grokipedia, Wikipedia, Wikidata, or any platform where you don’t have control, make sure you’re prepared and get it right the first time. Afterward, changing or updating it is a huge lift. I know companies that charge $5,000 a month to manage Wikipedia for you. You don’t want to be in that situation.
Take your time. Don’t go for the big result immediately. Prepare, get the press, and deserve these things. People forget that these are encyclopedias for human beings. Humans don’t want an encyclopedia page about the guy downstairs who runs the cafe. It might be great for his ego, but it doesn’t help humanity. It does help Google to have a Knowledge Graph entry, because that’s machine-readable and hidden in a corner for whatever it uses it for.
I had a Wikipedia page for years, because I’d been successful in multiple careers. I messed with it too much, and they deleted it. Then they went around every Wikipedia page where I was mentioned and deleted all of those too. Once you get the admins on your back, it can spiral out of control.
Thomas: The best approach to Wikipedia is to ignore it or to pay $5,000 a month, and I don’t recommend paying for authors. It’s not worth it. For a corporation, it might make sense.
The about page is so important that I have an entire episode on about pages as well as a Patron Toolbox tool called the About Page Drafter.
What do I need on my homepage?
Thomas: The homepage also, and SEO basics still count. You must understand the basics of metadata, as in your meta title and your meta description.
Authors often make the mistake of leaving the meta title and meta description blank simply because authors don’t know what those are. They see the word “meta,” and skip both fields. That’s a huge blunder.
Jason: A few years ago, Google stopped using the meta title exactly as given. The meta title is the title in the code behind the page that represents what the page is about. Up until around 2018, it was used as it was given, but now they mix and match. You still need to give them a meta title so they know what you want to appear in the search results for that page.
Thomas: Your meta title is the big blue underlined text on the search engine results page. When someone searches for John Doe and your name is John Doe, you don’t want it to just say “John Doe.” You want it to say “John Doe, author of science fiction and fantasy,” with some good keywords, so it’s clear the page is the official author website for John Doe, not John Doe the real estate agent you’re trying to beat.
Jason: The meta description used to be the little text underneath, but now about 50% of the time it isn’t the same text at all. The meta description is designed to help the machine summarize the page. So it should summarize who you are. I’d call it your executive summary. It’s the two or three sentences that say exactly who you are.
With AI, if you look in ChatGPT, it summarizes itself from the information it has. So the meta title and description don’t directly control the text the machine generates about you, but they do matter in the citations, the links it puts next to the answer. In terms of visibility, the meta title is the single most important thing most people will see.
Thomas: It’s a lot easier to do now than it used to be. In the Patron Toolbox, I have a tool called the SEO/GEO Optimizer that reads the page and writes you an initial draft of a title and meta description to paste in. Don’t automatically paste them in exactly as they are. You might want to tweak them, but having something in the meta title field is so much better than starting from scratch.
You don’t even need the Patron Toolbox. ChatGPT, Grok, and the others can help you optimize your website. Just give them your website and ask, “How can I improve the SEO?” They’ll walk you through it. A little knowledge helps, but you don’t want to blindly follow the AI.
Why shouldn’t you mention “SEO” to the AI?
Jason: I’d add that when you’re using these engines to figure out what to do for your personal brand, don’t talk about SEO. The tips and tricks for SEO aren’t the same as the ones for personal brands. It’s not completely different, but the priorities are.
In traditional SEO, we’d never have talked about the about page. So if you say, “I’d like to optimize my personal website for SEO,” you won’t get much advice about the about page.
What you can do instead is ask, “What would Jason Barnard tell me to do for my personal brand, given my website?” Give it the URL and ask it to do some research. Because I’ve educated the algorithms, it comes back with something close to what I’d say.
I’m not trying to trick the AIs or beat them with clever meta titles. I’m educating them. They’re children. They want to learn, and I’m here to teach them. I’ve taught them so well about my approach that I can go on a podcast like this and tell anyone, “You can do this yourself.”
Go ask, “What does Jason Barnard of Kalicube say I should do for my personal brand? I’m an author.” Describe yourself, and give it the URL. Perplexity does a great job of this, and ChatGPT in research mode will come back with something close to what I’d say. Just don’t use the word SEO in that question, because it’ll mislead the machine into thinking you’re trying to rank for “buy red shoes.”
How many pages should each of your books get?
Thomas: For an author, the three most important pages for ranking are your homepage, your about page, and your book page. I recommend creating a separate page for each individual book.
Often, an author starts out with a homepage, a book page, and an about page. Then they write a second book, and instead of creating a new page for it, they rename their book page to “Books,” push book one down, and put book two at the top. Now, there’s no single page for either book, and the best page for each one lives on Amazon instead of the author’s website.
An Amazon page is 90% links to other books. Almost none of those covers are yours. You don’t want to send people to Amazon until they’ve already decided to buy your book. If you want to maximize sales, keep as much of that interaction on your website as possible.
It’s fine to have a books page. I recommend one. But all I’d put on it is the cover and a sentence or two about each book, with a button. When someone clicks the cover, it takes them to a single super page for that specific book.
That tells Google it’s the page for that book, with all kinds of rich resources on it. Check out my episode on building good book pages. My Patron Toolbox also has the Book Page Scanner that scores your book page and tells you what to add.
You don’t want to cram all of that onto one page, especially with a dozen books. I’ve seen some really bad author websites with one mile-long page. No AI will read all the way to the bottom to gather information about every book.
Should you really send visitors away from your website?
Jason: Even if you’ve only written one book, you should create a category for books on your website. In WordPress, Wix, or any platform, create a category and then use one page per book.
Your about page is your Entity Home, the place the AI looks for your version of your own story. It’s looking for the same thing for each book. It’s looking for one page that talks only about that book, and that’s your version of what it’s about and why it’s interesting.
One page per book, one category for all your books, so the URL is yourwebsite.com/books/nameofbook. That’s an absolute. If you already have one book with a page, reorganize your site now so you’re ready for the next one. It’ll be much easier later, and the machines will have time to digest the change today. Prepare today for the change tomorrow.
Don’t be scared of linking out. If you ask ChatGPT about SEO, it’ll say “don’t link out, get all the inbound links you can.” But that’s bad advice for what we’re trying to do here. You need to link out from your about page to all your profiles, including LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and others, so the machine knows it’s the same person. It doesn’t automatically know that the person who was in the army is the one now writing a book. Linking out makes it clear.
It’s the same for the book. You give your Entity Home page for that book more power by linking out to the Amazon page, the Goodreads page, the Waterstones page. Traditional SEO will tell you you’re losing link juice. You are losing a little, and it doesn’t matter. You’re giving the machine incredibly clear instructions by saying, “This book is the same as that book over there, and when you have to choose a page to rank, rank mine, because it’s the Entity Home. It’s the clear winner because it belongs to me.”
Outbound links are good when you’re linking to the same thing on another site. As with your own Entity Home, make sure each of these sites says the same thing about the book, the same description, the same title. Don’t accept a slightly different title on another site. Change it yourself if you can, or ask them to fix it. The name of the book, and your name, need to be exactly the same everywhere. That consistency is what wins the game.
Thomas: To control this as an author, own your own ISBN. In the United States, that means going to Bowker. Each country has its own ISBN entity, so use the right one for yours. That’s where you set the book title and description. Most websites pull from the ISBN database. Then there’s Amazon, which you’ll have to update yourself, so make sure it all agrees.
Learn more by listening to my episodes on metadata:
- How to Use Metadata to Sell More Books
- Why Your Book Isn’t Selling: Metadata with Dave Chesson
- What Authors Need to Know About Book Metadata
The other advantage is that this is better for humans too. They’re the ones with money to buy your book. A human who doesn’t care about Goodreads isn’t harmed by a Goodreads link on your about page, but a big Goodreads fan looking for you there is blessed by a link that brings them straight to the correct page.
Linking out helps your rankings, and it helps humans find you where they want to be. Include links to purchase your books on Amazon as well as Barnes & Noble so readers can choose the retailer they like. It also helps Google and the AIs see that Amazon and Barnes & Noble agree about the book and its author.
What happens when another author shares your name?
Jason: We talked about how the AI understands that this is the same person with multiple facets. For me, I was a professional musician, then I made cartoons, and now I’m in digital marketing, speaking about SEO, GEO, and AI-assistive engines. What in the world tells the machine I’m not also a circus clown, an academic, or an ice hockey player?
Google and AI don’t necessarily understand that all these facets are the same person, and they have no way of knowing that the other people called Jason Barnard are not me. Your clarity, care, and consistency are what help them understand that you aren’t those other people.
We had a client a few years ago who shares a name with another author, and their books kept getting mixed up in the search results. Google thought our client had written three books, when she’d only written two. The third was someone else’s. It turned out her publisher had both authors on their roster with a single shared search page for that name. She got them to build two separate pages, one for each author, and that fixed it.
That’s an extreme example, but when you share a name with someone, there’s no way for the AI to understand it’s two different people unless you explicitly tell it. Again, we come back to one page per thing. We needed one page for her and one for her namesake.
Which domain name should you buy?
Thomas: If you can, buy yourname.com so you own it. It’s much harder for someone to push you out. This matters so much that if you haven’t published your book yet, you might consider tweaking your author name so you can own yourname.com.
For some authors, that means going by three names instead of two. If your first-and-last-name version is already taken, first-middle-last probably isn’t. Buy the .com for that. Everyone will know you by the three names, and you’ll have the high ground for a more specific version of your name.
What I don’t recommend is a single middle initial. Thomas G. Umstattd doesn’t work, because people leave out the G. My former co-host was James L. Rubart, and his publisher even left the L off one of his book covers.
Nobody respects a solo middle initial.
With two initials, like C.S. Lewis, everyone uses both and no one mixes it up. But a single middle initial gets left off half the time, and now you have an even bigger disambiguation problem. Is this James Rubart? James L. Rubart? Jim Rubart? You end up with all these versions of the name, and it becomes a mess.
Pick a single name, use it consistently, own the .com, and everything else gets easier.
Jason: I tell authors not to buy your name with a hyphen, so not Jason-Barnard.com. That’s a disaster waiting to bite you. Think carefully about a hyphen in your name at all. It’s difficult to get the AI to respect and understand. I’d change my name, put the two parts together, and get on with it. A hyphen is a mess waiting to happen.
Thomas: It’s a Boolean operator. You can’t put a Boolean operator inside your name and expect a computer to interpret it, any more than an ampersand or a question mark. The machine breaks on a hyphen in a name for complicated technical reasons.
Hyphens confuse the machine to their core. This isn’t getting fixed with the next version of ChatGPT. It could be confusing forever.
Jason: The other problem is James versus Jim. People think it doesn’t matter, but it does. You have to use the same name everywhere. Whatever variant you pick, you must be incredibly consistent, or you’re throwing another rock into the machine’s pond as it tries to understand you.
Imagine a naive child, desperately trying to understand. Every time you throw a rock in the pond by using a hyphen or calling yourself Jim one day and James the next, you confuse the child.
One thing people overlook in SEO is confidence. An AI might understand who you are and answer correctly, making it seem like the job is done. But when it’s highly confident, it answers from memory, like in our Napoleon Bonaparte example. When it’s not confident, it has to look you up, which leads to inconsistent results. Sometimes the answer is excellent; other times it’s wrong or confuses you with someone else. That’s why consistency and clarity matter. Use the same name everywhere, and avoid hyphens, variations, or name changes across platforms.
We had a client who had an incredibly common name in Portuguese. We changed the spelling of her name, and within two days the AI could spit out exactly what we needed, including her entire CV, because we changed it everywhere online at once.
If you change your name, change it everywhere within two days. Prepare the work, then do it fast. Don’t spread it out over two or three months. Make a full list of everything you need to change, and do it in one day. Double-check the next day to make sure you finished. If it’s done in two days, the machines will switch over for you, and it’ll be beautiful. Changing the spelling to something nobody else uses makes it so easy for this AI “child” to understand.
Does your domain ending matter?
Thomas: A unique name isn’t a panacea. There are other Thomas Umstattds out there. You’d think with a last name like Umstattd I’d be the only one, but the other two I know of are my father and my son, so we work it out.
Let’s say you want to keep your name as is, but yourname.com isn’t available. In that case, I recommend something like authorjohndoe.com. Adding “author” clearly identifies you. Readers will immediately recognize it as your website, and the domain is often available.
If there’s already an author with your name, you may need a three-word domain instead.
Jason: That’s a good idea. I work with entrepreneurs, so I’d never suggest that to an entrepreneur, because nobody can spell entrepreneur.
For me, the question is whether you’ll always be that person, and whether that’s all you are. If you’re just an author, that’s your career, and you’re comfortable with that, then yes.
I have multiple facets, so I wouldn’t link my name to one of them, because if I want to pivot my career, it becomes a problem. But if being an author is your career going forward and you don’t intend to change, adding author to the domain is a good solution.
Thomas: What about alternative TLDs like .net, .org, or .guru?
Jason: Be careful with something like .guru for your personal brand image. It wouldn’t sit well with me, but you might feel fine about it. It’s a personal choice.
Ranking for your own name isn’t complicated. Traditional SEO says get a .com because it’s the most powerful, and that’s fine. But we’re not trying to rank against everybody for “buy red shoes,” or against Amazon for products, or against the big hitters in an industry, which is where you’d need a .com.
So .net is absolutely fine. If you have a stronger personal brand than the people who share your name, you’ll rank. The top-level domain, the .com, .net, .org, or .guru, comes down to what you’re comfortable with, what you can get, and how much it costs. Some are expensive year on year. They pull you in at $2 for the first year, then you don’t notice it’s $200 the next year, and you’re caught in a horrible situation.
The TLD doesn’t matter when you’re competing against other people with your name, unless you’re called Bob Smith, in which case maybe there are a lot of you.
Whatever you do, don’t let a domain expire. That’s a huge mistake, and not just for control of your own name. If you signed up for something like Vistaprint and left your credit card details there, whoever buys your expired domain can recover the account and buy things with your money. I got jasonbarnard.com from a guy who’d left his credit card details in Vistaprint. I didn’t buy anything with his money, and I deleted the card, but it made me realize that because I controlled the email, I controlled every account he’d ever opened.
Thomas: It’s also terrible for your brand. I’ve seen authors let their domain expire, and then objectionable content gets placed on their name.com. For one author it was held for ransom, for another it was spam, for another malware, and for one it was worse.
If you’re buying domains for your book titles, I recommend getting booktitle.com. Set up a redirect so booktitle.com points to yourname.com/books/booktitle, exactly the URL structure Jason recommends.
It lets you say, “Go to CourtshipInCrisis.com to learn more about my book, Courtship in Crisis,” and it just redirects them to a page on your existing website. But you’re committing to keep renewing courtshipincrisis.com forever.
There’s an ongoing cost, and not every book is worth it. You may need to be honest that a given book has a lifetime of five or 10 years and you’re not willing to commit to a domain for all time. That’s fine. Just be aware that it’s a powerful technique if you’re willing to pay for it.
Jason: I have prepaid my own domain. I just turned 60, and I expect to live to 90, so I have the domain name prepaid for 30 years, and then I can die in peace.
Do you need to learn schema markup?
Jason: I wouldn’t bother. It creates headaches and fear, so I wouldn’t bother. I’d create an HTML table, which anyone can do in WordPress. It’s just as effective. If you can do schema markup, go for it, but when you get it wrong, it’s worse than not doing it at all.
I’m friends with Fabrice Canel, who builds Bing Bot, so this is the guy who crawls the web for Microsoft. His view is that schema markup has proven so junky and so badly implemented that it’s as bad as keywords, and keywords are what we used to put in the meta before they got thrown out.
The engines do read schema and use it, but they’re wary of it.
I’m not saying it doesn’t help, and it’s worth doing if you’re 100% sure you’ll get it right. But it’s likely to create problems if you don’t know what you’re doing. You’d do better to put that same information in an HTML table and to write your about page and book pages in an incredibly clear way.
Instead of schema, go in and say, “Here’s my description of who I am. Here’s what’s on my about page. What would Jason Barnard write for me?” It’ll produce something that does just as good a job as schema without the technical side.
An HTML table works the same way. You can have a table with two columns, attribute and value, and the machine immediately understands it. An attribute is just a date of birth, or place of birth, and such. An HTML table is structured data.
Schema markup is structured data too, data structured so a machine can read it. Headings and paragraphs are structured data. An ordered or unordered list is structured data. So think about structured data, not necessarily schema markup. Schema is just one option.
Thomas: If you use headings, you already have good structured data. WordPress now guides you into heading best practices, such as using one Heading 1, multiple Heading 2s, then Heading 3s nesting in. That’s a good structure.
If you do anything with schema, I’d set your contact page to the contact-page type and your about page to the about-page type.
If you’re authoritative enough, when someone Googles your name, Google will show a menu of your website right in the search results, which pushes the other results down. Now someone has to scroll even farther to find the insurance agent. I don’t know why I keep picking on insurance agents, but it feels like every agent has a website, and they’re often competition for a Joe Blogs or a Bob Smith.
Jason: Use schema markup to identify the contact page, an about page, a profile page, or an article. That’s super helpful, and most platforms like WordPress and Wix make it easy.
So do the minimum of schema because it does help. Just don’t get into the geeky stuff, trying to make it incredibly detailed because some geek told you to. That’s where it gets important. If you’re not 100% confident, you’re likely to make a huge mess, and that mess will damage you.
Thomas: I have a Homepage Scanner, an About Page Scanner, and a Book Page Scanner that check for this sort of thing.
What’s the one plugin that handles the scary stuff?
Thomas: To help with SEO, I recommend the Yoast plugin for WordPress.
There are other good SEO plugins for WordPress, but Yoast has been the best for so long. It’s so popular that it’s become its own best practice.
I think more people use Yoast SEO than use Wix. About 60% of websites run WordPress, and Yoast is the most popular SEO plugin for it, so Google sees so many Yoast-optimized sites that it’s become the standard. You’d have to be sophisticated to justify a different plugin.
If schema scares you, just use Yoast. It has these wonderful little dots. You turn the dots green. All the AIs can help you with Yoast. If you get a red dot and ask, “What does this mean?” any of them can walk you through it. Yoast gives you a dropdown where you can choose the schema for the about page, and it handles the schema and the sitemap in the background.
You typically don’t need the paid version. I run a bunch of author websites and only pay for Yoast on AuthorMedia.com. For most authors, especially if you’re only competing with a few real estate agents for your name and a few authors for your book titles, the free version is more than enough.
If you want more training than we’re giving you here, Yoast has a free SEO course on their website that I highly recommend. It walks you through some of the more technical aspects we didn’t get into.
Jason: Yoast deals with schema markup so that you don’t have to, and it does a great job. It’s so common that the engines understand it natively. Same with WordPress. It’s so common that it’s a no-friction way into your website for a bot.
If someone builds you a bespoke website, that’s friction for the bot. If you use a WordPress plugin that isn’t Yoast, that creates friction too.
Think about it from the bot’s perspective. What am I trying to achieve? If I want Google Bot, Bing Bot, or the ChatGPT bot to access my website, understand me, and use that content in my favor, I need to make their job as easy as possible. That means using something common like WordPress. Wix isn’t bad either, but WordPress is far more common. Use the free version of Yoast. I’ve never bought the premium version, and I’m a professional.
Then look at how you build your pages, with headings, paragraphs, tables, and lists. Structure it so it’s incredibly clear and simple. Use Gutenberg, the standard block system in WordPress. There was pushback when it arrived, and I never understood it, because machines think in blocks. Build your pages in blocks and make each one clear. This block is about where I was born. This block is about my career as a blue dog in a cartoon. This block is about my career as a musician. Then the machine can say, “I understand this page and can break it into its distinct parts.”
That’s hugely important. Focus on making it easy for the machine to break the page into simple chunks. Then evaluate whether you are keeping it as simple as possible.
Thomas: I’ve been a fan of WordPress for 20 years. I thought it was good then, and it’s only gotten better. Because it’s so popular, Google already understands WordPress and knows how to navigate it. Authors who go with something else invariably hit a limitation after a year or so, get frustrated, and start over on WordPress anyway. Do yourself a favor and start there.
I have a free course that walks you through building your own WordPress website. I use Divi, which is similar to Elementor. It gives you a Wix-like ease of use with the power of WordPress in one package.
To recap:
- Use clear headings and structured data throughout your website.
- Be explicit about who you are and what you write.
- Write a detailed, third-person author bio on your about page.
- Get interviewed on podcasts, blogs, YouTube channels, and Substacks.
We covered PR in a recent episode, and the same principles apply to SEO. In many ways, PR is an SEO shortcut. Businesses spend a fortune trying to earn the kind of media exposure authors can often get for free. A plumber would love to be interviewed, but there isn’t an ecosystem of podcasts, blogs, and YouTube channels dedicated to plumbers. Authors, on the other hand, have access to a thriving network of media outlets created by authors and for authors.
Being a guest on podcasts and doing interviews also helps train the AIs and sends links back to you. It’s one advantage you have over that real estate agent with your name. Most podcasters don’t want to interview real estate agents, but they’ll interview an author, especially if your book is interesting.
How can you optimize your guest interviews for SEO and AI engines?
Jason: Many authors get interviewed on a podcast and imagine that the machines will figure out who they are. They might, but they probably won’t. Link out to it. Have a page listing all your podcast appearances and link to every single one. Make sure the anchor text, the words that make up the link, clearly communicates, “This is me on this podcast, with that person, talking about this topic.” That helps, and it reduces the wasted effort you put into every appearance.
Every article about you, every podcast appearance, and every video needs a page on your website. List them all, link to them. Create an HTML table or a list of structured data. Make sure the text you use for the link, the blue underlined text, clearly names the two people on the podcast and what you talked about.
Has SEO stopped being a fight?
Thomas: I recommend doing that on your press kit page. It has your bio, information about booking you as a guest, and, as a credibility builder for podcasts and radio shows and for AI, a list of all the interviews you’ve done. Podcasts are also more likely to have you on if they know you’ll promote the interview to your audience. The more you promote it, the more they want you back. It’s a great reciprocal arrangement, and it also helps the AI.
Check out these episodes about creating a press kit:
That’s one thing I love about this new era of search engine optimization. Twenty years ago, it felt antagonistic. Everything was secret, and you were fighting the search engine and everybody else.
Now AI wants to work with you and help you. You can ask Gemini, “How can I optimize for Google?” and it’ll tell you. You can ask, “How can I optimize for Gemini?” and it’ll tell you. It’s a much friendlier, much less technical world.
We danced around a few technical topics, but it’s not that complicated. If you’ve ever typeset a book with a chapter one and sections inside it, you already understand structured data. The same headings you use in Microsoft Word, Heading 1 and Heading 2, are the same approach on your website. Learning to do it on your website will help you do it in your book.
Some people have never used styles in Microsoft Word until their web guy made them use Heading 2s in WordPress, and suddenly they say, “Oh, now I understand how chapters work, and now I can auto-generate a table of contents.”
As you level up your technical sophistication, you get to use that skill as an author, not just as a marketer.
It’s a great investment. Learning to optimize for Google also builds your muscles for optimizing on Amazon. I have an episode on the Amazon search engine, and you’ll notice much of what Jason said here matches what we covered there, because the search engines aren’t that different.
Do you still work with authors?
Jason: Generally, no, but we have a lot of free resources, so knock yourselves out. My entire Kalicube Framework is free to anyone who wants it. Go to kalicube.com or JasonBarnard.com and download the free guides. We’ve got copywriting guides, personal-brand-building guides, a diagnosis tool, and an audit, and it’s all free.
We work with entrepreneurs who need headspace. They don’t have time but want it done properly, and don’t want to think about it.
What I’ve built with the Kalicube Process is a universal solution for managing your personal brand in search and AI. I give it away free because this is an existential problem humanity needs to face. How AI understands and represents you may not feel important today, but it certainly will in a couple of years.
We can’t serve everybody, but we can relieve people of the headspace and the work, and we do it properly. We’ve got 25 billion data points and a machine that does it incredibly effectively. But what we’ve described today is already enough for 98% of the authors out there. You don’t need me.
Do you have any final tips or encouragement for someone trying to rank on Google for the first time?
Jason: Don’t obsess about the design of a new website when you launch it. It won’t rank or appear for at least a month, so the design doesn’t matter at first. What matters is the content.
Launch it, get the content on there, and get the right photos. Getting the right photos is incredibly important, so you don’t spread the wrong one and end up stuck with a horrible photo you don’t like anymore.
Make the text clear, and let the design come in week two, because only then will people start visiting. If obsessing over design delays your launch by two or three months, you’re just wasting time. Get it out there and figure out the design after week one or two. As long as the design is reasonable, it doesn’t matter if a few people see it early. So don’t obsess about design when you launch. That’s my number one tip.
Thomas: To put an exclamation point on it, my book was controversial when it came out 10 years ago, and people wrote hit pieces on it and on the blog post it was based on. One of these hit pieces was popular, and it had a good photo of me. Do you know why? Because they stole it from my website. They spelled my name correctly, and I think they even linked to my website.
From a Google perspective, that hit piece was great. It was mean, it hurt my feelings, and it made my mom angry when she read it, but from an SEO perspective it reinforced everything on my website.
Jason: Once a photo gets spread across the web and used consistently, it’s hard to get rid of. We had a client who had a photo out there that he didn’t like, and he paid us a lot of money over a year, somewhere around $40,000, to get rid of it in all the AI and search results. He felt so strongly about that photo that he was willing to pay $40,000 to remove it. Don’t put yourself in that situation, because $40,000 is better spent on something nice.
Thomas: $40,000 buys a lot of Facebook or Amazon ads. You can get in front of a lot of readers.
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Joy Cleveland, author of Lucy in Bloom
A small-town romance in which a guarded bookworm and a warm-hearted pastor discover that falling in love takes a little courage and a lot of faith.
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