Keywords are the words and phrases that Internet users type into search box of a search engine, such as Google, to find what websites that match what are looking for. Keywords are the same in books when you publish them. The keywords you choose for your book(s) is just as important as the keywords you select for your website.

Q. Is it important to have “key words” in the content of my web site? Why?

A. Keywords go hand-in-hand with the previous answer/blog post about marketing your website. Keywords are going to help get your website higher rankings which means closer to the first few pages of results.

Some keywords get hundreds of thousands of unique searches a day while others get a couple of hundred. At the same time, some high trafficked keywords are very competitive online because many people/companies/authors are using them.

Take the keyword phrase “educational children’s books” I like to use that, but so does Scholastics. It’s a very important keyword but it’s not necessarily the ONE that is going to get me found.

In my previous post I mentioned the keyword “romance book”. That, like the above, isn’t enough. In Amazon alone that pulls up over a million choices. You have to be more specific, like “vampire romance” of course that pulls up over 30,000 options in Amazon. Then you add in another keyword to your phrase like “humorous vampire romance”. That’s about 700 choices, you may be found, or they may eventually get to your book. Keywords make all of the difference, but they also must be words and phrases a regular person would use. I mean “Funny bloodsucker relationships” definitely narrow the search, but how many people, really, are going to use that in a search?

Most people don’t know the ins and out of search engine optimization (unless they too have a website and need to learn it). Most people just type a question into a search. “What’s a good vampire romance book?” Do you know what their going to get? Goodreads posts. Amazon category lists… why bother? Because the next listing could be your blog where you wrote a list of your 10 favorite vampire romance books and suggest that if they liked those, they’d most certainly like your book too!

That’s when you embellish upon that post with another that connects to that post talking about your preference of that whole Twilight series, and if your opinion is similar to your reader, they’re going to build a bond with you – becoming a fan.

That’s how it works.