Post series: 5 Useful Digital Marketing Pointers for Book Promotion (Page 1 of 2)

Image Courtesy of bookmarketingtools.com

Part Two: 

Use Basic SEO

on your Website, Blog or Book Description

by Sarah Jarvis

If you have a website, I highly recommend optimizing your content, meta-data, H1 tags and obtaining quality backlinks, so when people go to search for good books to read on Google, yours pops up.

If you don’t have your own website there are still a few things you can optimize to help increase your visibility. I would imagine most authors just said, meta-what? Don’t worry too much about the first sentence, unless you do have a website and are interested in SEO. If that is the case I would suggest checking out The Beginners Guide to SEO by Moz.

For those authors who just want to do simple optimization on their blog or book description, here are a few pointers.

Sometimes when you are adding a description of your book or an about the author, your platform allows you to edit the HTML. If that is the case I highly recommend adding <h1></h1> around a descriptive title of your book. For example, my book is titled Moral Dissipation, but when writing about it if I was allowed to edit the HTML, my title would look something like this:

<h1>Moral Dissipation: Suspenseful Heroin Addiction, Romance, Fiction Novel about the Struggles of a College Graduate who ends up a Homeless Heroin Addict</h1>

Once the blurb is live you will no longer see the <h1></h1>, but those tags tell search engines it is a title and your description will rank higher in search engines for the keywords in that title.

You don’t want to make the title too long, because that looks spammy to search engines. You also want to make sure it sounds normal when read out loud or it might be considered keyword stuffing, which is another spam tactic you want to avoid.

On Amazon the Editorial Reviews section allows you to edit basic HTML when writing about the author. In addition to including the above heading, I also wrote an informative blurb about my book making sure to bold <b> </b> the keywords for which I want it to rank, such as fiction novel, romance, heroin addiction, and donating because I am donating 10% of my profits to organizations that help recovering heroin addicts.

If you have anything that stands out or makes your book different, put a bold tag around it.

Find more writing and publishing tips at Nothing Any Good.

About the Author

S.M. Jarvis is an author, mother, SEO analyst and waitress. She has just released Moral Dissipation, a fictional romance and suspense novel about heroin addiction. Moral Dissipation gives readers an inside glance at the life of an addict and how a single addiction can impact multiple lives. It also provides information about signs of opioid addiction and how to revive someone using Narcan nasal spray. 10% of profits will be donated to organizations that help recovering heroin addicts and their families. Read reviews and order your copy here.