So you've written the next bestseller, it's been finely tuned and now it's time the whole world gets to see the fruits of your labor. Only one problem: how do you do it? How do you get your work into the hands (and eyes) of potential readers?
You're going to have to do a little marketing. The best initial steps start with SEO (search engine optimization). SEO is the process of growing the quality and quantity of website traffic by increasing the visibility of a website or a web page to users of a web search engine results page, accomplished through unpaid, or organic means.
This is very important and you can either hire someone like me who is experienced in this realm, OR you can opt to do a little legwork for yourself. If you do want a professional's help, please email me or send me a message in my submission form. If not, it's your lucky day! I'm going to give you a couple tips pro bono.
Let's break down five SEO tactics can help you as a writer sell more books.
1. Create Your Online Identity
It's 2020 and every writer needs an author website. A web search is the first place people go when looking you up and you want to make it as easy as possible for them. It allows you to control your content and gives people a better look at you as a person. Make sure you get a quality domain name. If that's not possible, make sure you develop a catchy name for your persona.
2. Contribute To Your Community
As a writer or someone with a passion for anything, there's a high chance that there are people with similar interests to you. One thing you can do to bolster your SEO is to guest blogging, or the act of writing content for another person/company’s website. This is a great way for you to provide valuable content and works in other ways like:
Brings traffic back to your own website
Increases your domain authority by using external links to higher authority domains
Builds your own brand credibility and awareness
Creates more relationships with peers in the similar industry.
Guest blogging offers mutual benefits for the parties involved. However, it is just one method in a slew of others that help SEO.
3. Create Excellent Content
As previously mentioned, writing quality content is a crucial aspect of white hat SEO. Not only is it required to avoid a penalty from search engines, it will also set your website apart. Building high-quality content creates trust with your target audience and keeps them coming back for more. There's no one-size fits all content for your niche, but rest assured I may cover some more examples in a later post.
4. Cloaking Is Bad. Do Not Do It.
Cloaking is showing one piece of content to users and a different piece of content to search engines. A "bait and switch" as it were. Websites practicing this type of black hat SEO will do this in order to make content rank for a variety of terms irrelevant to their content. It's bad practice and should not attempted when you commission or build your site.
That's not to say tailoring your content to different groups of users is unacceptable. Good tailoring practices include:
Shrinking the size of your website when someone visits from a mobile device
Changing the language of a page based on the country someone is visiting
Switching ads that appear on a page in order to fund content
These examples are completely acceptable. As long as you are not just changing the content that appears for search engine crawlers.
While there is no clear-cut rule to determine what's acceptable and what isn't, my best advice is to ask yourself: Does what you intend to do solve an issue for the client/customer/viewer? If it does, then it’s acceptable.
5. Consider Starting A Blog
Blogging is a great way to build SEO as long as you produce quality, consistently. Google's search engine doesn’t want to deliver its users outdated or thin information. Websites that are regularly updated shows them that the website is alive and continually offering fresh content. It also gives the search engine algorithms more reason to index your website more often, which helps you stay on the radar!
You’re probably not going to have reasons to update your website homepage frequently, so a blog would be a more practical tool for adding new content to your website on a regular basis.
Thanks for reading, I hope these five SEO tips helped. Now go implement these tactics and get seen!