Building Your Web Presence for Authors: Finding the Best Keywords for Your Site

Every website and blog wants to attract more visitors from Google and the other search engines, that's why SEO related topics are so popular. The most important part of making this happen is having good content. If you have good content, traffic will eventually flow to you. If you don't have good content, what visitors you do get won't stay long and definitely won't return. With that out of the way, we're going to talk about keywords.

Finding and using the right keywords are a critical step in helping you build your brand and your online presence. Keywords aren't necessarily words, they can be phrases. "free Kindle eBooks" is a keyword. Entire books have been written on the algorithms Google uses to determine who gets to the top of their search results. As a fun bonus, by the time you're done with a book, the algorithm has probably been tweaked. While countless factors go into determining the ranking, if you want to get people coming to your site looking for free eBooks for their kindle, it's not a bad idea to use the phrase "free eBooks for your Kindle" once or twice on your site.

Many people on the internet are at one extreme or another on keywords. Many people ignore keywords all together, while just as many inject keywords every other sentence. If your site is about free eBooks by all means use the term "free eBooks" in your text. Where you start losing visitors is when you start using "free eBooks" in every sentence. Using a term too often makes your users feel like their reading a spam email. If you're wondering "how much is too much?", then you're not alone. The accepted golden rule is this: You write for people, not for search engines. With that said, you should write for people with your key words in mind.

The first part of our page for Lizzy Ford novel "The Warlord's Secret" uses this text:

The latest book from the author is Damian's Oracle and Damian's Assassin is here!

Full length fantasy romance novel "The Warlord's Secret" is now available for free download for your Kindle, Nook, eReader or Kobo.

Is that the way you're going to talk to a person you meet on the street? Probably not unless your job is reading movie trailers for commercials all day. But it doesn't sound too bad, and it uses some keywords. Why did I word it that way? Because as I write this if you type in "free romance eBooks" in Google that page is on the bottom of page one. I wish it was at the top, but for right now I'm happy with page one.

Just as important as how to use keywords is what keywords to pick. As important of a step as this is, it's usually skipped. Why? Because it's easy to skip. We've all done it. The process most people use looks like this:

1: write

2: post

3: hope

If you're an "advanced" web author you:

1: think about what terms people will search for

2: write making sure to use those key terms you think people will search for where appropriate

3: post

4: hope

While the "advanced" web author has it close, I would like to suggest a step one and a half. Take those keywords you brainstormed and put them to the test. Don't guess what people are typing into Google, make Google tell you. If you're afraid that it's a complicated process full of spreadsheets and math, it doesn't have to be. You can do it in a few minutes, for free, using Google keywords. I've made a short video on youtube demonstrating how easy it is to start with an idea or phrase, and see what people are actually searching for in Google.

Please feel free to ask any questions you might have, or just let me know what you think!