Tag: keywords

Create Eye-Popping Headlines for your Blog in Six Easy Steps

Whether you are Tweeting or writing a blog post, your headline is what captures the reader’s attention. I know that I’ve struggled with headlines my whole life. Sometimes I can sit down and pound out 800 words in minutes but it will take me an hour to figure out a six-word headline.

Headlines online are quite different from headlines in newspapers. Online headlines must stand-alone and help the reader decide if they want to click through.

So, how do you create a headline that people want to see? Continue reading “Create Eye-Popping Headlines for your Blog in Six Easy Steps”

The Title Will Tell

Long before the prevalence of internet keywords to help people narrow down a search, the concept applied to book titles. To be more accurate, it applied to books in popular fiction. Literary fiction has its own thing going. You pretty much know if you see a book with a title like As Grow the Wild Tulips, or A Garden in Antioch, you’re probably looking at literary fiction.

With popular fiction, the keywords become genre-specific. You can be pretty sure if you see words like heart, song, secret, or forever that the book is a romance novel. As with all rules, there are exceptions. Other keywords also play a role, so Cannibal Heart might not necessarily be a romance. Neither is this short list all-inclusive. I’m sure there are romance titles that don’t include any of the keywords I mentioned, but those words are strongly representative and indicative of the romance genre. Continue reading “The Title Will Tell”

Keys, Tags and Penguins Part 2

Stick with a white hat

We left off last time exploring the wacky world of Google searches, and what people actually look for. Your homework (Did you notice it was homework? That’s ok, I forgot to mention it.) was to play around and find half a dozen kickass key words that would help people find you.

I’m going to suppose that an avid Indies reader, Candy McFancy—who writes fantasy—has done just that and we’re going to build her website. She’s read the great tutorials from Kat and from Jen on downloading seo plugins for WordPress and devising titles and descriptions, so in this post I’m going to concentrate on how her key words are going to build a better site. Continue reading “Keys, Tags and Penguins Part 2”

Keys, Tags and Penguins (Part 1)

What’s a penguin got to do with anything?

When I mentioned yet another post about SEO to the fellow minions they suggested, relatively politely, that I might explain why anyone should care. We have already had splendid examples of great SEO advice, here for example, but it bugs me that most writers still aren’t playing the SEO game to its full advantage. And I care, so there.

I know that most of us are on Amazon, Goodreads etc and people who like books find us that way. We have lively blogs, they gain loyal fans and your fame spreads by word of mouth…but people Google for books too. If they already know your name or your book title they can usually find your website but suppose they just want ‘fantasy fiction’? I just Googled it, not a single author on page 1. And yet 165,000 people Google for fantasy books per month. Book Reviews? 1,500,000 searches per month, and not a single reviewer’s blog on page 1. People are looking for you and they can’t find you. How do I know? I’ll show you later.

Why say it again though? And why now? Everyone’s read loads of articles on SEO and they all disagree with each other. Here are a few secrets: Continue reading “Keys, Tags and Penguins (Part 1)”