Great question, Web. You definitely want to remember that Amazon is a search engine, so you need to “optimize” your Amazon sales page with the right keywords and book categories. But you also want to do that with your website so that, for example, people looking for information on mysteries and mystery novelists find you. Make sure your site content has the keyword phrases people will use in Google when they search for the types of books you write.

Sandy

The challenge is fun, isn’t it, Renee? My amazing webmaster installed that social sharing toolbar recently when another one suddenly failed. It’s Ultimate Social Deux.

You can get a few more resources for social sharing toolbars on this blog post: http://buildbookbuzz.com/3-tips-for-better-author-blogs/ .

Sandy

I appreciate all of the feedback. It’s an awesome feeling when total strangers are willing to lend a helping hand. Thanks again for clarifying some additional points.

Thanks, James. You’re very generous with your knowledge and we appreciate it!

Sandy

Kudos for your initiative! You’ve obviously done some homework on SEO and keyword research. The “tedious process” you describe is exactly what we all should be doing from the beginning; however, few of us have the patience or the foresight.

The work you are planning to do may not have instant payback, but it will shape your blog for the future and do a better job of leveraging your existing content. Be glad you are considering this change while you only have 80 posts and not 280! Also, making these changes *before* you have a lot of traffic is actually an advantage–you have nothing to lose but your time.

As for deciding whether or not the work is “worth it,” just consider the pros and cons of going either way. You can be pretty sure that the changes will be an improvement, but you can’t tell how much, so how you *feel* about those changes should be taken into account. If you don’t make the changes, will that bug you because you think you are leaving traffic on the table? When you publish a post, will you be frustrated by the category choices you’ve made? You’ve already done the research, so doing the legwork of changing the posts and feeling like you are moving forward might be the best choice from a peace-of-mind standpoint.

Sorry if I got philosophical there. That seems to happen when I can’t give a definite answer. 😉

I am considering modifying some of my categories to term(s) that get comparatively high traffic on searches and low competition on search results. This tedious process will involve adding new categories, recategorizing the past posts, deleted old categories, and installing a plugin to hopefully eliminate file errors. Is all of this work worth the effort of redoing 80+ posts. Will this have a significant effect on SEO?

I realize that gaining an audience is a time consuming process that requires patience. Nevertheless, if there are things that I can do to enhance my chances of having my posts read, I am open to changes.

It can get a bit lonely when your site has limited traffic.

Your feedback is appreciated.

Hi Sandy,

I don’t think you need to limit the number of categories you create so much as you should make sure they are relevant. The purpose of a category is to help visitors find content that relates to a particular topic of interest. They help the search engines do that too.

Using your blog as an example, your categories add great keywords to every page, and they generate a keyword-rich and search-engine-friendly URL. Here’s an example:
http://www.sandrabornstein.com/category/international-schools

Your categories are most valuable from an SEO standpoint when they are specific and include relevant search terms. You have to decide for yourself how specific to make them. If get too specific, you end up with so many categories that it becomes difficult for your visitors and yourself to use them effectively. So, I suppose there is a practical upper limit. Right now, you have 11 broad categories. I think you have room to be more specific if you wanted, but from personal experience, I can say managing more than 30 categories can be tedious.

I’m not sure what you mean by tags (that term means different things in different contexts), but in general, they cross-reference or index your posts. Again, keep them relevant, but feel free to add tags that use different words for the same thing. You wouldn’t want that kind of redundancy in your categories, but tags are designed for indexing, and you should feel free to cover all the terms a searcher might use.

I hope this information helps.