Ten MORE Tips for Maximizing Your SEO Discoverability as an Author

This post on maximizing your SEO is looong overdue, so I figured I would stick this post in between my “planning your big breakthrough” post that’s forthcoming! In a seminar at the Book Expo of America, I had the pleasure of gleaning a ton of useful information from Lori Culwell, a Book Promotions Megastar! When you’re done reading this, definitely check her and her website out at www.bookpromotion.com and give her a shout on Twitter and Facebook while you’re at it! She is the QUEEN of SEO and stepped my game up ten fold! Here are her ten tips that I scribbled down at the Book Expo of America:

1. Have your own website. She says that your website should be the “epicenter” of your book promotion world. A good landing page where people can find out about you, your books and products, and your PR events (signings, appearances, special sales, etc), is integral. Furthermore, your website should be hosted with a web hoster (like DreamHost) where you can have your own server and your own domain name!

2. Have a blog with an RSS Feed. You never know how people will find your content, so kick off an RSS feed. Also, Google will be able to pick up on your feed and your fresh content, so that this will show up in Google searches (dependent on the keywords).

3. Use photos and pictures. Lots of people love to pin and tweet pictures. Using multimedia will capture your audience and hold their attention, especially when it comes to connecting with your with people who just share the same interests as you!

4. GENERATE EMAIL LISTS. Mail Chimp and Aweber are very good email capture systems that will allow people to subscribe to your website & blog and will create a growing, glowing audience.

5. Use Social Media (and make sure that ALL your social media icons are on your website)! These social media links will allow people to get in contact with you in the way that they are most comfortable. I’ll add to this that you should also have “social media sharing links” on each page, so that if someone reads your article and they like it and want to share, they have a bunch of different ways they can post your article in just one click! They should be able to Tweet it, Facebook it, “StumbleUpon” it, and more. Give them loads of options!

6. HAVE YOUR BOOKS ON YOUR WEBSITE, and make it easy for people to buy them! If it takes five clicks to buy a book, that’s three clicks too many. Embed links into pictures of your book covers to get them right to the place where they can buy it, or even better, embed an Amazon link to your book right on your webpage.

7. Give people links to you media appearances, press stories, and other awesome press about you! Did an interview lately, or have you just finished a blog tour? Did your book pop up somewhere in the press? Great! Now you should create backlinks to all the media, interviews, and press stories you appear in across the web. I’ll add to this that you should also create an online press room on your website, but I’ll get more into this when it comes time for me to build my own press room. We can build our press presence together! 😉

8. Contact information. Make it easy for people to contact you! Your contact info should be displayed prominently on every page, and aside from email links, you should also have a Contact Me form embedded right into your website.

9. Use Analytics to track your traffic & demographics. Cloudflare is great, and Google Analytics is even better! Get an analytics code from Google, and embed it into the HTML of your website to see which pages are the most popular, who is coming to your website (who are unique users versus who are repeat users), and much more! This will help your marketing and inform what kinds of information you should blog about.

10. Talk about your personal author interests! Give your site a personal touch by talking about your hobbies, your interests, your travels… all the things that make you who you are. You never know how people will connect with you, and getting personal and personable is how you can tap into new networks and make quirky connections!

I hope this is helpful! Building up an online presence is not an easy or quick task, but with patience and elbow grease, you’re sure to dominate the first ten pages of Google search and captivate your audience! So what about you? Do you have any tips to increase your SEO discoverability? Drop them here and let’s chat about it! 🙂

In the meantime, keep it indie, and remember, dolls set the trend!

<3 Colby