7 foolproof SEO tips for authors

By Miral Sattar

Let’s be honest. You understand the power of Google, but have no clue how it works, right?

This lack of understanding can be a problem for authors, though.

You rely on Google, the largest search engine in the world, to help readers discover your books, so you really should know at least the basics about how to get found.

What you do to your website and Amazon sales pages to make sure they’re discovered through Google searches is called search engine optimization – SEO. And there’s lots you can do to make sure that readers find you and your books when they’re searching online for your topic, name, or even parts of your book title.

Here are seven ways you can use the power of SEO to make it easier for readers to find and discover your books immediately.

1. Optimize your Amazon pages.

There’s no question that Amazon is one of the most well-indexed sites online. The search box there is a search engine, after all. Actually, if you search for your book or your name, it’s likely that your Amazon page will show up much higher than your website does.

Here are a few things you can do to optimize your Amazon pages:

• Make sure you have an Author Central account with your bio and picture. This will help you rank higher on Amazon searches.
• Connect your social media accounts to your Amazon Author Central page.
• Make sure your book has the relevant keywords you would use to find a book like yours.

2. Start blogging on your website and do it in a meaningful way.

It’s important to have a blog because it’s the key way that people learn about books.

It’s a good idea to blog to add value and not just to blog for the sake of blogging. David Gaughran and Joanna Penn are great examples of authors who blog effectively.

Blogging helps make sure that when people type your name into the Google search box, your website shows up on the first page of search results. They will then get to your site, where you  have all the information about you and your books that they need (and want).

3. Optimize your blog for Google.

You want to make sure that your blog is optimized for Google so that when it gets “crawled” or visited by all the major search engines, they will find the right content.

Plugins that include Yoast  will help you set up tags, title, keywords, and metadata.

Another way to optimize your blog is with sitemaps. This is a structured listing of all the pages on your blog or website. It tells Google and other search engines about your site’s structure.

A sitemap also lets Google know when a new post is published so it can index it and add it to search results.

4. Understand and use outbound and inbound linking.

Linking (links from one site to another) is another critical element of SEO.

You want other sites to link to your content, and you want to link to theirs, too. Let the sites you link to know you’ve linked to them so they can link back to you, too.

When someone links back to your blog posts, it’s basically a vote for your content as far as Google is concerned. Those links to your site are weighted by Google according to their reputations. For example, if TIME.com links or Buzzfeed.com links to your site, you get the equivalent of bonus points from Google.

5. Guest blog.

Guest blogging is a great way to establish yourself as an expert. It provides an opportunity to link back to your book or site in your bio that runs with your guest post (like the bio at the beginning of this article).

When author Hymn Herself wrote a blog post about 5 Things Movies Don’t Tell You About Mental Institutions for Cracked.com, the link to her book in the article bio helped her sell 1,000 copies in a few days.

She wrote about that experience for us on Bibliocrunch.

6. Write good headlines, keywords, and metadata.

Having a good title tag that tells what the blog is about will help make your content easy to search. When I worked at TIME, I was in charge of all the SEO and one of my responsibilities included training journalists in SEO.

Here are a few tips:

• Titles: Writers love using titles that don’t say anything about the content. For example, “Amazon Stops Selling Hoverboards Over Safety” is much better than ” You Don’t Want to Buy This Dangerous Gadget.”
• Keywords: Have five to seven keywords that describe your content. Examples would be: Amazon, hoverboards, hoverboard safety, Swagway, consumer safety
• Meta description: This is a short paragraph that describes your blog post content. This will show up in Google results. The meta description for that article about hoverbards might be, “Several models pulled by online retailer Amazon over fire hazard fears. Leading hoverboard maker Swagway confirmed the online retailer is requesting companies manufacturing the popular devices to prove they are safe to use.”

7. Make sure your site is mobile-friendly.

Because a lot of users now read on smartphones and other mobile devices, Google changed its algorithm in April 2015 to penalize any sites that are not optimized for mobile devices.

Use the free Google tool to test if your site is mobile-friendly: Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool

These tips will definitely help you rank higher and make your books easier to find. If you’d like more help implementing these and other important steps that will help your book get found and purchased, register for my new training program, “Masterclass: SEO That Translates to Book Sales.” (This is an affiliate link.)

This course for authors will teach you how to get more traffic, fans, readers, and buyers for your books. And, Build Book Buzz readers get a 50 percent discount on registrations through tomorrow, June 7, 2018, so make sure you check out “Masterclass: SEO That Translates to Book Sales” now! (This is an affiliate link.)

15 easy and evergreen SEO tips for authors

By James Byrd

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the practice of making your author website more attractive to search engines. Some Internet marketing companies would have you believe that SEO is a black art best practiced by the experts, for a hefty fee, of course. Don’t believe it. With a few minor changes to the way you create content today, you can have a positive and long-lasting impact on your site’s position in the search engine results.

At my company, we call the tips I’m about to give you “evergreen” SEO techniques because they stand the test of time. These techniques are not designed to “trick” search engine spiders into favoring you. They are dedicated to giving the search engines what they want. What they want is the same things your readers want: high quality information that is easy to find. The tips you find below won’t ever go out of style.

Offer good content

The best website and blog content is targeted and useful. Targeted means it is written for a specific audience. Useful content either solves a problem or entertains. General tips for writing good content include:

1. Provide step-by-step or “how-to” instructions.

2. Clarify a widely misunderstood or complex subject.

3. Relate an interesting or amusing story.

Include organic keywords

In this context, the term “organic” essentially means “as they naturally occur in your writing.” SEO specialists get great joy from researching keywords related to the topic at hand, then “keyword stuffing” those terms into the content. Most writers I know have no interest in doing keyword research, particularly if they’ve ever given it a try, and certainly not for every blog post. Instead, I recommend integrating the following techniques into your normal writing:

4. After writing, review your content for terms you’ve used repeatedly and replace them with something else.

5. During your review, include terms you’ve heard from your audience, even if they don’t seem completely accurate.

6. Don’t be afraid to include well-known industry terms even if they seem technical. It will help the members of your audience who are “in the know” find your content.

Provide accurate metadata

Metadata is a scary word, but all it means is “data about data.” Your blog post or article is the data, and the metadata includes information like the title, description, category, and tags associated with your content. These elements deserve special attention when you publish your blog post or article. Remember that getting good placement in the search engine results is only part of the battle; you must get people to click through to your site for that placement to have any real value.

7. Craft your title to get the attention of people who are looking for the kind of information you provide. Cute titles might work for an entertainment piece, but they don’t attract potential visitors who are focused on solving a problem.

8. Make sure that the description under your link in the search results is specific and that it accurately summarizes the benefit of clicking through to the page. How you do this depends upon the tool you are using to publish your content.

9. If your web publishing tool (for example, WordPress or Blogger) offers ways to tag or categorize your content, do so. Tags and categories often create separate index pages of related content on your site, and the search engines will find and index those pages too.

Update frequently

It has become more important than ever to keep your site from looking like you’ve abandoned it. Not long ago, Google released the “Panda” upgrade to its search engine algorithm, and many sites saw their traffic fall off by 50 percent or more as a result. Others saw little or no change. Google keeps its algorithm pretty close to the chest, but one of the biases of Panda quickly became clear: New content is better than old content.

Add new content to your site as frequently as is practical for you. Every two weeks should be the minimum if you want to attract and keep followers (more on that below.) Daily is great, but it’s a grind unless you know a lot of people who will guest post for you. The main thing is to get on a schedule you can follow consistently. As for figuring out what to write, try these tips:

10. Create a “swipe file” – a file or folder of snippets you can use for reference and inspiration. If you have an idea for a post, add it to your swipe file before you forget it.

11. Save comments you make on other people’s blog posts. Each one is a potential gem of inspiration for a post of your own.

12. When you answer a question for someone via e-mail, save the exchange.

Make your content popular

Even if you do everything I’ve covered above to make your content the best that it can be for the search engines, whether or not you get traffic still comes down to a popularity contest. All other things being equal, a popular site comes up higher in the search results than an unpopular site. One of the main criteria for determining popularity is how many other sites link to yours. Here are some tips for increasing the odds that visitors will learn about your site and link back to it:

13. Include social media “like” and “share” buttons on your pages. The Google “plus-one” button is particularly important because it is a direct vote of confidence from your visitors to Google.

14. Allow visitors to “follow” your blog via email and RSS.

15. Use your social media accounts to announce every time you publish new content.

Most of us have enough to do without dedicating time to something as onerous-sounding as “search engine optimization.” If you use the above tips, you can work SEO into your normal routine and feel confident that your efforts will continue to work for you long into the future.