What is S.E.O?
Search Engine Optimization. Like all web analytic studies, when I first learned about S.E.O I was blown away. To be honest, I’m not following my own advice here. I’m not investing the time and money in plugging S.E.O. because I don’t have it. But if you’re an author who loves the marketing aspect of writing and has one hour every day to spend on this, it’s definitely worth it. Do authors have to learn SEO?
S.E.O is big business. I mean big businesses are hiring people to do their S.E.O and no, its not just about appearing in the first five pages of Google search. Its sooo much more.
If you want to learn the basics you can sign up for a free course at Coursera. I learned the basics because I’m a biology person, I can understand the technicalities of the human brain but not a computer. So, you can do a more specialized course, but this is the free one that I did.
There are tons of benefits of SEO, but I’ll just give you the author’s perspective.
SEO for authors
Choosing Book titles
I never knew this before, but there’s a reason we’ve started seeing longer book titles like “How to sell more books in a depressed economy.” You must have seen these books with these super long titles, I mean how do they even fit it into a cover. The reason being S.E.O. Google is changing S.E.O to be more specific to audience questions. They’re even going to change page ranking mechanisms this year.
So if Google starts seeing questions like how to sell more books in a bad economy, guess what, you’re book will be number one in the search findings. When you’re choosing a title, type in your title into a kewword tool. and check the keyword density. Also use the keywords generated or similar to describe your book in its descriptions or blurbs. Authors are now using SEO to create book titles. If its a keyword rich title, it will appear more often in search results.
Online presence
All authors are working to build a brand and having your name synonymous with something, especially if you’re writing in a particular niche can be super helpful. But if you work with S.E.O in mind, you will definitely be able to draw the right crowd in through search engines and search terms. While I don’t encourage keyword stuffing, if you’re using the right words you will be able to attract the right audience. Many websites offer separate plugins for S.E.O.
Its worth looking at the plugins on your website and reinforcing that through the plugin. For me its writing. So I make sure that’s part of the tags and S.E.O. in my writing posts. If you want to learn more, I suggest using Moz. They’re the best at teaching you stuff about this. Sign up with them. You won’t regret it. I must admit, some of it flies right past my head, but its good stuff.
Ads
Many of my co-authors at publishing houses are spending their own money on ads. Facebook ads, Twitter ads, Amazon ads, they’re putting their book out there, wherever possible. For all these ads you will have to use SEO. You can’t just create great copy for an ad. You have to search for comp titles, authors, genres and then create a copy stuffed with words to draw similar readers. In fact, I can write an entire blog post on doing SEO for ads. That’s how big it is.
Matching
S.E.O may not result in conversions no matter what you’re call to action is, but it does bring in the right crowd to you. If you’re a romance author, then it brings all the HEA fans to ya. If you write historical romances, you get the historical fans, if you write only for the Victorian era, then authors can target SEO to rake in fans from there, if you’re writing medical historical romance then you will have a more tailored audience. The point I make is this, you can get as broad and as narrow as you like in drawing the right crowd who will actually buy your books and love them.
What do you think of S.E.O? How do you tackle it? I’m overwhelmed but learning. Care to share a few tips?