If you’ve read any articles on search engine optimization, then this will be a basic post for you, but if you’ve been hearing about keywords and seo and wondering what it means, then this may serve as a starting point.
You don’t need to learn a lot about the search engines to be a successful blogger (and sell more books through your blog!), but there are a few things you can do when constructing your posts that will make it more likely people will find your site via Google, Yahoo, etc. One is using keywords in your titles, permalinks, and posts.
What are “keywords”?
Hey, glad you asked!
Keywords are the words and phrases people type into the search engine when they’re looking for something. As you might imagine some terms get used more often than others. What you type in when looking for information isn’t necessarily what everybody types in when looking for that same information.
Part of search engine optimization is learning which terms people are using most often in searches related to your niche (or genre for my fiction folks). Then you use those terms in your posts. That way when people type in those keywords, your post is more likely to come up on the first page of the search engine results.
Clear as slug slime, eh?
Let’s use an example related to blogging.
Examples of keyword usage for author-bloggers
Say you’re a paranormal romance ebook author, and you want to attract your target audience to your blog. Since people love lists and often link to them as good resources, you’ve decided to put together a list of paranormal romance ebooks (with your own books at the top of the list, of course!).
We want to see what terms people are Googling to find new authors in this genre. A quick check over with the free Adwords Keyword Tool (this is designed for people running advertising campaigns, but you can also using it for researching keywords and usage frequency for your own purposes) reveals the top searches related to paranormal romance (the numbers are Google’s estimates for global searches per month):
paranormal romance — 27,100
paranormal romance novels — 6,600
paranormal romance books — 6,600
free paranormal romance — 2,400
paranormal romance authors — 1,600
paranormal romance writers — 1,600
best paranormal romance — 1,600
Armed with this information, you can title your book list in a way that uses these words. That will make your post more likely to appear in the search engine results when people type in these terms. (When people are promoting their links on Twitter, I see so many blog post titles that tell me absolutely nothing about the content of the post; this is bad for enticing people to click and worse for helping search engines send the appropriate traffic your way.)
You wouldn’t want your title to look spammy in an attempt to jam lots of keywords in there because ultimately you still have to appeal to human beings (something titled “Best paranormal romance | free paranormal romance | new paranormal romance authors” wouldn’t get me to click). That said, you can certainly design your title so it hits upon a couple of these keywords.
Off the top of my head, perhaps:
- The 100 Best Paranormal Romance Novels from 2010 (uses three of the keyword phrases listed above)
- 50 Free Paranormal Romance Books for the Kindle/Ipad/Nook (uses three keywords and lets people know we’re talking about ebooks while using the more frequently searched term books instead of ebooks)
I’m sure you can come up with better titles. Just remember the idea is to get people to want to click while telling them and the search engines exactly what the post is about.
Note: It helps to use the keywords in the content of your posts too. Don’t overdo it (keyword “stuffing” is frowned upon and will get you dinged by Google), but sprinkling the chosen terms in where appropriate will help. The search engines strive to deliver the most useful results, and keyword frequency is one of the things that helps them decide why one page is a better match than another.
Note: You may naturally be inclined to go for the most popular keyword phrases (i.e. paranormal romance), but more popular terms tend to be more targeted by other bloggers. Shooting for a less frequently searched keyword (i.e. best paranormal romance) may let you rise to the Number 1 spot for that search term.
Last note (I promise!): Remember my post on link building? It helps to get other people to link to your post using your keywords in the link text. A lot of times, people just link using the title you created, so this is another reason it’s good to have your keywords in the title.
The end result of using keywords
At the end of the day, using keywords can mean bringing more traffic to your blog, so the answer to the question in my post title is, yes, you probably should care about them, at least a little.
The cool thing about search engine optimization is that what you do today to “optimize” your blog can have long term payoffs. Unlike Twitter and Facebook, where traffic disappears as soon as you stop promoting your work, blog posts can and do continue to rank in the search engines for years.
Taking a few seconds to research and use keywords related to your post can mean a little more traffic to each of your entries. And more traffic should mean more book sales in the long run!
Thanks for that – I hadn’t come across the Adwords Keyword Tool before. I see that a lot of people search for ‘e publishing’ rather than ‘epublishing’, so will use both in my blog labels.
Keywords ought to be one of the simplest parts of our process. Why then do they so frequently leave my fingers hovering over the keys, my eyes glazed, my jaw hanging open? Maybe it’s because, though these are components of the language we so adore, keywords resemble math in their fussy, demanding way.
Of course, there’s always the possibility, too, that I’m a dimwit.
Lexi, yes, there’s all sorts of information available for those Adwords publishers. 🙂 I just like that that particular tool is free. There are programs out there that give more details, but they cost money, and we don’t need to get *that* involved with SEO for our author blogs. Just a little knowledge puts us far ahead of the pack, because few authors pay attention to this stuff!
Mark, I think it’s just that terms like “search engine optimization” sound boring as dirt. My eyes glaze a bit, too, I must admit. 😀
I am a beginner with keywords and ranking with google. This did help, thanks so much
Cool. I’ve used keyword tracking, but didn’t think to use it when creating post titles *headdesk*