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
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