SEO Tips and Tricks (for authors)
I’ve been doing a bit of research today (prompted by an ad of all things!) on SEO and how to maximize my little Sci-Fi book actually being found in the massive databases of Amazon and Kobo.
In addition to picking out some very specific key words to tag my book with, there are some other ideas I wanted to share with all of you:
1. Take a spin through Google Insights. It takes a bit of work. but you can use it to hone your tags. So for example, I assumed the most powerful tags for my book Justice for all Time would be ‘Time Travel’ and ‘Sci-Fi.’ Here are Google Insight‘s findings for searches for those terms in the past 12 months:
What this told me is that Sci-Fi is a much more searched term, so for sure to include that, and also that books don’t even come up as sub-searches in either of those Insights.
My findings are that the following tags are most effective: Sci-fi, time-travel, time travel, back to the future (I know), romance-adventure, sci-fi-adventure and time-travel-romance — in that order.
2. Get reviews (do giveaways, as for help from Beta readers etc.)
There are lots of blog posts on the internet about how to do this, but my best piece of advice is to get your manuscript edited (by someone you can really trust) before sending it out to potential reviewers. When it works, it really works, and a good review can bump you up on Google and on Amazon. But a bad review can hurt you, so be ready.
3. Figure out which categories are most-popular and avoid them (at least at first)
The concept here is simple: if you publish your ebook as a ‘Sci-fi’ at Amazon, you will find out the hard way that your book is #837,932/837,932 in Sci-Fi books. Awesome. How the heck would anyone ever find that!? On the other hand, if your primary category is ‘Time-Travel’ at Amazon, suddenly, your book is #8.379/8.379 books. Wow. Much more find-able I’d say. Now categories change all the time, and there is no hard and fast rule between the different e-publishing softwares, but I will say iBooks for SURE works the same way. Check your categories and try to be more popular by being more popular in a less popular category.
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Understanding the Google+ Dashboard’s ‘Insights’ by @jeffchiarelli (searchenginejournal.com)
