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
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:
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.
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.
Choosing Keywords That Describe Your Book (Part II: Keywords for Authors Series)
In Part I (What Are Keywords?), we learned that keywords are simply the terms people type into the search engines when they’re looking for something. In this section and the next, we’re going to talk about how to figure out which keywords you should use to bring targeted readers (and book buyers) to your site.
The hardest part about keyword research is realizing that what keywords you’d use to describe your book aren’t necessarily what the general population is going to use. In order to bring in the most visitors (or “traffic”) to your site as possible, you want to target the keywords that the majority of the people are using.
Let me give you an example.
If you’re an author, you might be inclined to market your epic adventure story as a “fantasy novel.” Anything can be a book, but fiction works are called novels, right? That’s more precise, so you’ll want to use that in your web site copy, right?
Well, according to my keyword research tool, “fantasy book” is searched more often than fantasy novel. That means it’d make more sense for you to use book in your keyword phrase than novel.
I’ll post links to online keyword research tools in the next section. Right now, let’s just worry about brainstorming some keywords.
You’re going to want to take a moment and write down all the phrases you can think of that people might use to search for your novel. This is definitely a good time to ask friends, co-workers, relatives, etc. what they think too. You’re close to your work (probably an expert on your topic), and it’s hard to remember what terms the average non-expert might use to find your work.
I’ll stick to my fantasy novel keywords and give you a few that pop into my head:
fantasy novel
fantasy book
epic fantasy
swords and sorcery
best fantasy books
fantasy adventure
new fantasy authors
Ok, now it’s your turn. Write down all the keywords you can think of for your book. I’m a fiction person, so I’m using fantasy for an example, but keywords can work for non-fiction too (actually, it’s easier to be very specific with non-fiction–when people are looking to learn something, they usually have a more precise idea in their minds of what they’re looking for than when they’re simply looking to be entertained).
If you’re having trouble coming up with possible keywords, head over to Google Suggest and play around with it. You can start typing in a term, and the tool will suggest ways to finish it.
When you’re done brainstorming your list, you’re ready to move onto Part III: Finding out Which Keywords People Are Searching.
What Are Keywords? (Part I: Keywords for Authors Series)
In the search engine marketing world, we talk a lot about keywords. To put it simply, a keyword is a word or phrase that people type into the search engine box to find what they’re looking for in the search engine results.
If I were looking for a new author to read, I might type in “romance novels” or “epic fantasy.”
If I needed help doing something, I might type “how to lose weight” or “how to buy a house.”
Any of those phrases can be considered keywords (despite the fact that they are strings of words; apparently keyphrases didn’t roll easily off folks’ tongues).
Most people don’t type in a single word any more. There are simply too many web sites out there, and you won’t find what you’re looking for with a broad, single-word search. Instead of typing in something like “novels,” you’d probably type in “paranormal romance novels” to get more precise results.
Specific keywords are good for the searchers, and they’re good for you too. It’s a lot easier to rank (have your website come in at a high spot on the search engine results page) for a specific term. This is something to keep in mind in the next section, where we’ll discuss choosing keywords that describe your book.
Move onto the next section: What Are Keywords?
How Keywords Can Take Your Book from Obscurity to Popularity
When you first published your book, you may have thought it would be as easy as creating a web site to market it to the online word. People would magically show up and buy your book in droves.
Didn’t happen, did it?
That’s because there are zillions of web sites out there now, and (brutal honesty time here) it’s dumb luck if someone stumbles onto yours. Why?
1. You’re not a big name author yet, so nobody is going to be typing your name into the search engine.
2. Your book is new and nobody knows the name of it, so they won’t be typing that in either.
3. There are thousands (probably tens or even hundreds of thousands) of books that share your genre or topic, so the odds aren’t good of someone typing in “<genre> novel” or “how to <topic>” into the search box and landing on your site either.
Before I thoroughly depress you, I’m going to show you the virtual silver lining.
With a little Internet marketing, you can actually get those folks from the #3 category to your site. These people can account for a ton of traffic. The way to get them is by optimizing your site for certain keywords that are related to your book. Don’t know what a keyword is yet? Don’t worry. We’re covering that in the first part of this five-part series on keywords for authors.
You can use keywords to draw traffic (highly targeted traffic looking for exactly what’s in your book) to your site, and it can be done without spending money (although spending money does make things easier and can be written off on your taxes).
So, without further ado, let’s get this series off the ground. (You may want to bookmark this page to refer back to it later.)
Part I: What Are Keywords?
Part II: Choosing Keywords That Describe Your Book
Part III: Finding out Which Keywords People Are Searching
Part IV: Using Keywords on Your Website
Part V: Why Your Keywords Should Be in Links to Your Site