Search-Engine Exposure for Book Authors
Transcript of Search-Engine Exposure for Book Authors
Search-‐Engine Exposure for Book Authors
By Ted Galdi www.tedgaldi.com
Who this is for
Search engine op@miza@on, or SEO, is a great marke@ng tool for non-‐fic@on authors, in addi@on to fic@on authors who write about real-‐world topics people are likely to learn about on search engines like Google
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SEO is about free traffic
SEO involves geIng your website listed in the non-‐adver@sing por@on of search results. It doesn’t cost you any money.
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How SEO increases sales: 5 steps 1.) You write a book about some topic, let’s say bird watching
2.) You launch a website for the book and fill it with educa@onal content about bird watching
3.) Someone interested in “bird watching” does a Google search for it
4.) Your book’s website shows up high on the Google results and the person clicks a link to visit it
5.) ASer perusing your website, the person decides to learn even more, and clicks an Amazon link on your site to buy your book
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What you’ll learn in this e-‐book
How Google and other search engines determine which websites they show at the top of the results aSer someone searches for a phrase
How to get your book website as high as possible in these search results
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Part 1 Your Book Website
GeIng a book website, and making sure Google likes what’s on it
You need a dedicated book website
For your website to show up in the Google results, you of course need a website (you’d be surprised how many authors don’t have one). If you already have a site, you’re off to a good start.
There’s a difference between having a web page on the internet for your book, and a dedicated website for your book; Google pays much more a\en@on to dedicated websites…see explana@on on next page.
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What’s a dedicated book website?
Yes • A website that’s about just
one of your books
• A website that has its own domain name, like www.example.com
No • An author website with a
page for each of your books
• A sub-‐domain of a larger website, like Wordpress.com/example
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Need one?
Luckily, nowadays it doesn’t cost a lot of money to get a website for your book, and doesn’t involve a large @me commitment either.
There are a handful of services online that let you build your own site, even if you know nothing about coding. Weebly is a good example:
www.weebly.com
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You have a site, now what?
There are three things you want to make sure your book website has:
(1) A prominent link to your book’s Amazon page, where readers can go to make a purchase
(2) Keywords your target audience is likely to search for on Google
(3) Educa@onal content about the topics your book is on, @ed into the keywords you’ve iden@fied (this is done through “landing pages,” discussed next)
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Your site’s landing pages
Your Book Site
Topic Pages on the Site
“Best ci@es for bird watching”
“Most-‐elusive birds”
“Binocular recommenda@ons”
Official Book Website: Bird Watching 101 by John Smith
You want to add pages to your website dedicated to the keywords you plan to target. Each page should contain educa@onal content about a keyword phrase.
In the example to the right, “Best ci@es for bird watching” is an example keyword phrase; a page would exist on the book website with a @tle matching the phrase, and content related to the topic.
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But, how do I pick the right keywords?
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Let Google help you
You should focus on keyword phrases that have a high search volume, and are relevant to your book’s topics. The more searchers a relevant phrase has, the more poten@al website visitors you have.
Luckily, Google provides a free tool that allows you to look up the volume of any phrase: The Google Keyword Planner.
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Accessing the tool: 2 steps
(1) Get to the tool with this URL:
h\ps://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner
(2) Sign in with any Gmail email address
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Using the tool Enter keywords related to the topics your book is about and see how many people are searching for them. Obviously, super-‐large search volumes are appealing, however, keep in mind that many other people/companies are compe@ng for those terms in the Google results.
It’s be\er to find keywords that fit specifically into niches, as opposed to generic terms. You’ll be compe@ng against less websites this way. For instance, with a generic phrase like “cars,” though it has a lot of searchers, it’s almost impossible to show up high in the results for it, since so many people/companies target the word.
However, if you’ve wri\en a book about a special type of car engine, specific terms related to that engine would be ideal; you’d be compe@ng against way fewer web pages within this niche.
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ASer you’ve iden@fied phrases…
ASer you’ve iden@fied your phrases, you want to create a landing page on your website dedicated to each one. There’s no limit to the amount of phrases and landing pages you can have.
The @tle of each web page should incorporate the targeted phrase, and the body of the web page should contain text (at least 400 words) on the topic.
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Part 2 How Search Engines Rank
Web Pages
Inside the way Google and other search engines decide which web pages get listed at the top of the
search results for a phrase
The search-‐engine flow
(3) Search engine outputs a ranked list of
web-‐page results
(2) Search engine
decides what pages are
“best” results
(1) User types in a search phrase
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Two factors decide who’s “best”
#1 The On-‐Page Factor
• Is the phrase the user searched for displayed prominently on your web page?
• How many @mes does the phrase appear on your web page?
• Does the overall theme of the text on your web page match the phrase’s theme?
#2 The Off-‐Page Factor
• How many links does your web page have on the internet?
• How many links does your en@re website have on the internet?
• How “important” are the websites that link to your site?
Each factor’s weight is rela7vely even
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The on-‐page factor The on-‐page factor refers to the text content on your landing pages, par@cularly @tles and bodies.
Images, videos, and other non-‐text content can definitely make your page more appealing to humans, however, they don’t provide much help to search engines; thus, make sure you have a lot of text on your page, at least 400 words.
Finally, though it’s good for your keywords to appear mul@ple @mes on your page, if you overdo it Google will penalize you by not showing the page in the results at all. Stuffing your keyword phrase on the page 20 @mes is a bad idea. Try to keep it to no more than three men@ons.
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The off-‐page factor The off-‐page factor refers to other websites on the internet, and links they contain to your site. Google and other search engines have come to the conclusion that if a web page has a lot of links around the internet, and those links come from popular websites, then the web page must be “important,” and deserves to be at the top of the rankings. Google calls this system “Page Rank,” and assigns every website on the internet a ra@ng of 1-‐10.
For instance, Google’s algorithm has determined that the New York Times website ([email protected]) is very important based on the number and quality of links it has, and treats it very well in search results. Google did not establish this importance simply because the New York Times is a popular brand. Rather, the New York Times website has a lot of links all over the web, from large, important websites like CNN.com, Harvard.edu, etc, which Google recognizes as important because they themselves have a lot of quality links.
Let’s say someone searches for the term “governor race New York.” Google would likely include a result for a New York Times ar@cle much higher in the results than an ar@cle on a local news website about upstate New York, strictly because Google feels the New York Times website is more “important” based on the volume and quality of its links compared to that of a small local website.
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A site and all its pages
Ranking power of whole site
Ranking power of individual pages
When ranking any par@cular page in results, search engines look at the quality and volume of links the par@cular pages has, in addi@on to the links for all pages on the website.
For instance, when someone performs a search for “best ci@es for bird watching,” and Google decides how high up to list the landing page dedicated to that topic, it will not only consider the links on the web for the landing page, but all the links the Bird Watching 101 website has.
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Part 3 GeIng Links
How to get websites to link to your website, making Google consider it
“important”
Linking to your own content The easiest way to generate links is to do it yourself. It’s a good idea to include links to your landing pages on your other landing pages.
For instance, at the bo\om of the “Best ci@es for bird watching” page, it would be smart to link to another one of your landing pages, on a related topic. For instance, you can say something like this:
“Did you like the arFcle about ciFes to bird watch? If so, you’d probably also like my post about the most-‐elusive birds.”
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GeIng links from others Though linking to your own content is great, it’s even be\er to have others link to your pages. GeIng links from other websites is the founda@on of the off-‐page factor.
In order to get links from other people, you need to focus on two simple goals:
(1) Make sure you share your content with other people
(2) Make sure your content is good, so other people have an incenFve to put links to it on their websites
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Using social media
A simple way to get your content in front of other people is to use social media. The two main social-‐media tools are of course Facebook and Twi\er.
There are many other smaller channels as well, however, these two are great places to start.
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Using an email list
If you don’t have an author mailing list, you should start one immediately. When you create new landing pages, you can email links to them to your mailing list.
There are various affordable tools on the market that can help streamline the email-‐management process. A popular one:
www.mailchimp.com
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Thanks for reading
This e-‐book was wri\en by Ted Galdi, the bestselling fic@on author of Elixir. To learn more about Ted and his wri@ng, or to sign up for his mailing list, visit his official author website:
www.tedgaldi.com
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