Why You Should Be Writing & Syndicating Articles to Promote Your Book

This is a pretty basic tip in the world of search engine optimization and website promotion, but not everybody lives and breathes this stuff (as amazing as it is to me, not everybody finds internet marketing news scintillating bedtime reading), so I think it’s worth mentioning in this blog.

Let’s assume you’ve created a website and/or blog to promote your book.  Part of marketing your book online is realizing you need to promote your site at least as much as you promote your book.  Bring visitors to your site, and they’ll buy your book.

One way to promote your site is to write articles related to your niche (AKA what you wrote your book about) in order to get links to your site and to establish yourself as an authority in your field.

 These articles should be in the 500-word range, though there are no hard and fast rules.  Make sure they are helpful, as someone may read your article on another site and, based on it, decide whether or not to click through to your sites. 

To ensure those readers find you, you’ll include a resource box/author blurb at the end of each article.  This should include one or more links to your site.

Submitting Articles

Once you have a couple articles, you’re ready to submit them to article directories and well-known content sites that allow visitor-submitted information.

The article directories act as sort of a backwards bank.  You make a deposit (your article) and someone else collects (a copy of your article). 

People take your article, and they can use it on their site or in their newsletter.  In exchange (it’d be a crummy bank if you didn’t get at least something out of the deal), they are supposed to keep your resource box with your links intact (enough people do to make this exercise worth it).

The well-known content sites don’t allow people to take the articles, but they receive a lot of visitors, so your article will get exposure.  If you write a helpful article, some of those readers will doubtlessly click through to check out your site, and maybe even buy your book. 

Article Directories Worth Submitting to

There are a lot (and I do mean *lot*) more article directories out there you can submit to, but in my experience it quickly becomes a game of diminishing returns.  The less well-known directories get very little traffic, and it’s less likely your articles will be picked up and used.  Also, there’s always the possibility Google and other search engines will frown upon your identical content showing up in 200 different places with identical links back to your site.  At best, a lot of it will be ignored. 

So use the article directories I listed and maybe a couple more if you like, but don’t go overboard. 

Content Sites Worth Submitting to

Parting Tip: Not all of the links in your resource boxes need to go to the front page of your site.  In addition, consider linking to your blog, good articles on your site, etc.  Most article directories allow three links in the resource box. 

July 22, 2007 | Filed Under Search Engine Optimization | 1 Comment 

Why You Should Stay Away from Search Engine Submission Companies

You’re an author looking to promote your book.  You’ve just put your new blog or website up, but you’re not getting any traffic.  You see an advertisement that suggests (ok, shouts) that you should sign up with a search engine submission company that will submit your site to all the search engines to make sure they “see” it.  What should you do?

Run away.  Run away fast.

These companies will take your money, and they don’t do anything you can’t do yourself.  In fact, you don’t even need to submit your site to the search engines in order to be found. 

All of the search engines have little bots that mosey around the web “spidering” sites and taking note of new content and indexing (or including) new sites in their database. 

Yes, these bots can visit a site because someone has submitted it to the search engine, but they automatically go from site to site via links anyway. 

In order to have your site found automatically, there’s only one thing you need to do:

Get at least one link from one other site that is indexed in the search engines. 

Just about every site you know of is going to be indexed by the major search engines, but it’s easy to double check.  For example, to see if the site is indexed in Google, type site:URL (i.e. site:www.thenameofthesite.com) into the search box.  As long as you see the site listed on the results page, you’re in business.

You can use this same method to check and see if your site is already indexed.

Let’s assume it’s brand new, and you’re not in there yet.  How do you get that first link to your site? 

We’ll talk more about methods of getting free links later, but for now, just find a friend with a blog, website, myspace page, etc.  Make sure your friend’s site is indexed via the method above, and then ask him or her to throw up a link to your new site.  (Heck, ask everybody you know to throw up a link to your new site; you’re trying to promote your book after all.)  If you have your own blog or another website that is indexed, you can add a new link to your book promotion site on your own.

Shortly, the search engine bots will find your new site, and automatically include it in their index.  There’s no reason to pay anyone to submit your sites to search engines.

Now, whether or not you’ll get any visitors to your site is another matter.  To learn how to get more traffic, watch for posts on keywords for authors, search engine optimization, and other web marketing tricks.

July 15, 2007 | Filed Under Search Engine Optimization | Leave a Comment 

Why Your Keywords Should Be in Links to Your Site (Part V: Keywords for Authors Series)

In the last section, Part IV: Using Keywords on Your Website, we talked about how to optimize your home page for the keyword you selected earlier.  Now we’re going to talk about how getting links from other sites can increase your placement in the search engine results.

You see, what you do on your website is only a part of the search engine ranking equation.  What also matters is other sites’ reactions to your site.  If no one’s linking to you, your site can’t be very important, now can it?  (That’s the way Google sees things anyway.) 

One of the key ways to boost traffic and increase your search engine rankings is to increase the number of links point to your site. 

There are ways to go about getting links (without paying anyone) and we’ll discuss that more in the future.  For now, just worry about the links that are already out there to your site, the ones that are from friends, family, co-workers, etc. (all the folks you’ve cajoled into helping your promote your book). 

When you read these links, what do they say?  (The links are the actual clickable text, and that’s called the “anchor text” in the biz.)

Do they say your name?  The name of your book?  “Click here”? 

Ideally, you want as many of those links as possible to use your keywords.  This is especially true if you’re trying to do well with Google (and you should be, since it is by far the most popular search engine–they can deliver the most traffic to your site).

“Click here” doesn’t help as much as a keyword related to your book.

If I’m trying to come up highly ranked in the search engines for “fantasy books,” I might ask a friend to blog about my site and write something like: If you like fantasy books, please visit my friend’s site.  Fantasy books would be the clickable link. 

When the search engine sees your keyword in a link pointing to your site, it’s going to think your site is about your keyword.  It’s going to think people searching for your keyword on the Internet want to go to your site.

If lots of sites link to your site using that keyword, you’re going to rank highly for the term.  Don’t worry about every single site linking to you with “fantasy books” or whatever your term is (in fact, that could look a little unnatural to the search engines), but it’s definitely a worthwhile goal to make sure some of the links say that. 

When you combine the keyword optimization you did on the front page of your web site with the keyword-rich links coming into your site, you’ll start to see improvements in how your site ranks for those terms.  The closer you get to the first page of search engine results (and the closer you get to the top of that first page), the more traffic you’ll get to your site.  And more traffic should mean more book sales.

July 13, 2007 | Filed Under Search Engine Optimization | Leave a Comment 

Using Keywords on Your Website (Part IV: Keywords for Authors Series)

In the last section, Finding out Which Keywords People Are Searching, you figured out which keywords people are using to search for the information or entertainment your book contains.  Now we have to implement those keywords into your website in a way that will prompt it to come up in the search engine results for those keywords. 

In the industry, this is called optimizing your site for the search engines or “search engine optimization” (which is sometimes abbreviated SEO).  Now you’ll know exactly what people are talking about when they through that term around.  But let’s get back to how to make these keywords sell more copies of your book.

There are two things to consider: on-page optimization and off-page optimization.

The search engines use both in figuring out where your site should rank for any given keyword.  In this section, we’ll discuss on-page optimization, or how to use keywords on your web site.  We’ll cover the off-page matter in the next post.

To put things simply, you want to use the keyword you’re targeting all over your page.  Note, I said page and not website.  Just worry about optimizing one page for one keyword.  Start with optimizing your home page with your most desired keyword.  You can make other pages to target other keywords later on.

Here are the places where you should try to place the keyword (if you’re not an HMTL coder and you’re going to have someone build your web site for you, print out this list along with your keywords, and give it to them to implement):

1. Title

The title is the text that appears at the top of the browser window.  It’s not on the page at all, but it’s extremely important to put the keyword here.  The title is what appears in the search engine results. 

For example, if you’re targeting “fantasy books,” you might make the title Fantasy Books by Author Name.

If you can swing it, put the keyword first (as I did), but don’t do that if it would make the title awkward to the reader.  (Never forget the reader when optimizing your site for the search engines.  You want your keywords, but you want to impress your reader too–awkwardness doesn’t sell books!)

2. Header tags

The header tags are the headers you place above the copy on your site.  They are usually larger and bolder than the normal-sized font.  Try to use your keyword here (especially in the H1 tags, which are often used at the top of the page).

3. Body

Use your keyword in the copy of the page.  You don’t want to use it so often that it stands out to the reader (why the heck is she using “fantasy books” so often?), but once a paragraph or so will do nicely.

4. Pictures

If you upload your novel cover or another related image, you may want to save the file name as title-keyword.jpg or something similar.  Also use the keyword in the “alt” part of the image tag (the alt tag tells the browser what to display in case the visitor has pictures turned off).

5. Meta tags

These tags are invisible to the reader and are just read by the search engine to help categorize your site (though this is relied on much less today than it used to be).  You can place keywords and a page description in them for the search engines.  Don’t spam here.  Just include your keyword once in the keywords section and once in the description.  Write a good description as that is sometimes what will show up in the search engine results after your title.

6.  Menu

If it makes sense to do so, use your keywords in the menu links.  For example, a lot of people use “home” on inner pages to bring visitors back to the front page, but using the keyword you are optimizing your home page for can make more sense to the search engines.  Again, it may not make sense, or it may be too awkward to implement this, so use it at your discretion.

Those are the major components of on-page search engine optimization.  The first three items are paramount.  The last three are more in the do-it-if-you-can-work-it-in-smoothly camp. 

If you’re not going after a very competitive keyword, you may be able to rise to the top of the rankings using on-page optimization alone.  Chances are, however, that you’re going for a term that has at least some competition (the more people looking up a keyword every month, the more web site owners who will be trying to rank highly for that keyword).  That’s why it’s important to consider off-page keyword optimization, too, because the way others link to your site (and if they link at all) affects how much value the search engines assign your site.

We’re covering that next in Part V: Why Your Keywords Should Be in Links to Your Site

July 12, 2007 | Filed Under Search Engine Optimization | Leave a Comment 

Finding out Which Keywords People Are Searching (Part III: Keywords for Authors Series)

In the last section, Choosing Keywords That Describe Your Book, you brainstormed a list of terms, or keywords, you think people would use to describe your book.  I hope you also had a chance to get input from others as well.  Now that you have a list, we’re going to spend some time figuring out which terms are searched for more frequently.

There are a few tools online you can use to do this.  They’re able to tell how many times keywords are being searched.  Here are a couple free places you can check:

Free Keyword Suggestion Tool

A nice tool that gives you results from Wordtracker (they specialize in mining the search engines to see what’s being searched most often) and Overture (a search engine advertising company).  Usually, you have to pay to use Wordtracker, but through that link, it’s free. 

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

This is a resource for folks wishing to advertise with Google’s Adwords program, but it’s free, and there’s no reason you can’t use it to an idea which keywords are searched more often.  Make sure to select display results by “keyword search volume” in the drop-down box (this is the default setting).

You can use one or both of these sites to type in the keywords on your list.  The first site will give you numbers telling you how often the terms are being searched, and the second site will give you a little bar graph and lots of synonyms for your keywords.  Google’s site is a little easier to use, in my opinion, and you can also look up all your words at once. 

Specific numbers aren’t that important.  You really just want to get an idea of which terms are being searched most often.

Here’s the list I came up with on the previous post:

fantasy novel
fantasy book
epic fantasy
swords and sorcery
best fantasy books
fantasy adventure
new fantasy authors  

When I entered these keywords into the research tools, I found out “fantasy adventure” is most widely searched, coming in slightly higher than “fantasy book” and “fantasy books.”  Next came “fantasy fiction” and “fantasy fiction books” (which weren’t even on my list but would make good keywords).  “Best fantasy books” is further down the list as is “epic fantasy.” “Sword and sorcery” is way down (alas, the golden age of swords & sorcery seems to have passed).  “New fantasy authors” was almost at the bottom, meaning hardly anyone uses that term to search.

After you’ve noted which of your keywords is most popular, it’s time to choose the best one to target in order to bring traffic to your site and sell your book.  (Don’t throw away the list, though, because you can actually target different keywords on different pages of your site.  If it were me, I’d build a page on my site for each of the top 10 or 20 relevant keywords, but we’ll talk more about that another day).

You don’t necessarily want to choose a keyword just because it was searched for the most times.  Before you commit yourself, it’s a good idea to check out the competition.

Go to Google and type in those keywords yourself.  See what kind of websites come up.  Are the first few results high-quality pages that are updated frequently?  Are they corporate run?  Are they loaded with useful information?  It can be tough for a one-author operation to dislodge “authority” sites without lots and lots of work.  You may get more bang for your luck by targeting the next term on your list, or the one after that.

This is because your ultimate goal is to get your site listed on the first page and within the top few spots on the search engine results for your keyword.  Statistics show that most people don’t scroll down much less look to the second and third pages of the results.  If they find what they’re looking for before they get to the link to your site, you’re out of luck.

I was pleased when I typed in “fantasy adventure” because there wasn’t very stiff competition at the top.  The first result was some one-page site on a free server that hadn’t been updated since 2001.  The second result was a link to an obscure product on Amazon.  I could get my site to number 1 for “fantasy adventure” almost without trying.  There’s something to consider before I start frothing at the mouth though.

“Fantasy adventure” is a little ambiguous.  Remember, in this example, I’m trying to promote my fantasy novel.  People typing in “fantasy adventure” might be looking for some kind of exotic adventure vacation, or they might be looking for a fantasy video game, a movie, etc.  These folks might click on the link to my site, but they probably won’t convert (become buyers) as frequently as folks who are using book or novel in the keyword phrases they search.

Still, since I would be doing my website marketing myself, and it doesn’t cost me anything to add pages to my site and write copy, I’d probably go ahead and use “fantasy adventure” for one of the sub-pages of my site and work on getting that page to come in #1 for that position.

But because of the therm’s ambiguity, I wouldn’t make it my primary emphasis.  I’d go after the second most popular term in my list: fantasy book.

When I type “fantasy book” into Google, I see there’s more competition.  At the time of this writing (keep in mind, search engine results can change monthly or even daily), there is a pretty well-established fantasy book review site on the top.  They’re posting new reviews almost daily, which means they have lots of pages of content on their site.  Search engines love content, and they love it when you update your site frequently too.  It can be hard to dislodge those folks.

If I go further down the top 10, though, I see that there is one spam site (it has fantasy and book in the domain name, but there are only ads for the site content), and there are some sites that, while popular and well known, aren’t using “fantasy book” in the title, so they’re probably not trying to optimize (or make their site rank) for that keyword.  In other words, with some work on keywords and other forms of search engine optimization (a topic we’ll cover more in future posts), I could probably get the site on my fantasy book up within the top few results. 

So, at the end of the day, I’d choose “fantasy book” for my primary keyword (the one I would emphasize on the main home page of my site).  I’d keep “fantasy adventure” and maybe a couple of the other ones to work on later (linking them to other pages on my site).

I hope that my hypothetical walkthrough has helped you with your keyword research.  I know this can be a confusing topic in the beginning, but fortunately it’s something you only need to do once.  Once you know the keywords that will bring visitors to your site, you probably won’t need to change them.

What you will need to do is figure out how to use them.  When you’re ready, head onto the next post: Part IV: Using Keywords on Your Website.

July 11, 2007 | Filed Under Search Engine Optimization | Leave a Comment 

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