Celebrating Independent Authors
I hate keywords. “Use keywords,” they say, for your blog post, your KDP book, your website, your AMS ads. Figuring out which keywords to use is harder for me than writing the actual post/book/ad. But I’m learning.
An example: the other day while checking the Amazon rank of one of my books after a sale, I noticed something odd. The rank in three different categories was showing. The first one was: Continue reading “The Importance of Categories and Keywords for Your Books on KDP”
Authors, and others, have blogs and websites because they want to get the word out about whatever their passion is. What good is all that effort if no one ever sees it? Keywords, if used properly, will help get eyeballs on your work.
The key to all things keyword-related (no pun intended) is to put yourself in the shoes of the person doing the searching. What words or phrases would you search on if you were looking for the information? Think about that for a minute. Let’s say you were looking for a book on how to write gumshoe detective novels. Would you search on writing? No. You would get like a bazillion trillion results, none of which would be helpful. Would you search on how to write a book? No. Again, the results would be so broad – you’d never find what you need. You would have to search on the specific phrase of how to write gumshoe detective novels in order to get anything remotely helpful. Right? Let’s keep that logic in mind as we go forward. Continue reading “Tips for Using Keywords in Blog Posts”
As writers and authors one of our main goals is to attract readers, preferably ones who will actually buy our books and not expect to get them for nothing. To that end we try to figure out how to reach those readers and, once we do that, entice them to buy.
One of the most common questions asked among writers is, “How do we find our audience?” The advice on how to network, and which media sites will help us best, keeps shifting as new ones emerge and existing ones change for the better – or not. It’s almost impossible to keep up with all the information, let alone make the best choices that will work for our particular offerings. Opinions about what works and what doesn’t are almost as plentiful as authors. Continue reading “Writing for Robots?”
What is the difference between a keyword and a tag? That’s a very good question. Theoretically, they are the same thing. Since most of the time this question is being asked from a blogger’s standpoint, that’s how it shall be answered. And I’ll be using Indies Unlimited as an example to make it easy to follow.
The incredibly simplified answer to the question is: keywords are used to find things via search engines; tags are used to find things within your own blog. So, you would use keywords to help label your article so when people search on Google, they hopefully use the words in your article (or in your article’s keyword Metadata). Just so you know, metadata is “a set of data that describes and gives information about other data.” Thank you, Wikipedia. By the way, did you know Wiki has a series of pages on George Clooney? Anyway, your keywords make up a set of data that describes the information in your article. Got it?
Tags also describe your article, but they do it more like an internal filing system, if you will. About a year ago, the Evil Mastermind wrote an article about using keywords in book titles. Let’s say that article wowed you (of course it did!) and you want to read other articles with similar content at Indies Unlimited. At the bottom of the article, under the share buttons (which you always use, right?), you will find this: Continue reading “Keywords Vs. Tags”