What the heck is SEO and what does it mean to me? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and this is Wikipedia’s definition: SEO is the process of improving the visibility of a website or web page in search engines’ natural or un-paid search results.

For instance, my website, www.anneverett.com has a blog, pictures, events calendar, and info about me and my book. So, what if you’re looking for a book that is a humorous, romance mystery? How the heck will I ever get you to my page?

If you know my name or the title of my book and you type either one into the search bar, BAM! I’ll come up all over that first page, but what about all those people looking for humor books, or southern books, or Texas books? That’s where the SEO comes in and it all has to do with KEYWORDS.

As an author, I want Texas, humor, southern, connected to my website and book in order to be listed on the first page in the random search. Does that make sense? It’s very important to have the right key words connected to your site/book or product/business, etc.

Okay, where do you find these key words? Do you just come up with some on your own? You could, but how do you know they’re good key words?
For example, let’s take the word romance. My book is a romance mystery, so that should be a great key word for me, right? Nope.

Romance is searched approximately 13,600,000 times each month, which gives my book a competition of 363,000,000 of coming up on the first page of the search. WOW!

You want your key words to be low in random searches, allowing your book/website/business/product a better chance of appearing on the first page, or at least on one of the first three pages. I’ve heard people will only look at the first three pages of a search, so if you’re not there, you will never be seen.

According to www.searchengineland.com search engines “crawl” web sites, going from one page to another incredibly quickly, acting like hyperactive text scanners. They make copies of your pages, which get stored in what’s called an “index,” which is like a big book of the web.
When someone searches, the search engine flips through this big book that it has created, finds all the relevant pages and then picks out what it thinks are the very best ones to show first.

Check out the link below. Here you can type in a description of your book and it will choose some keywords for you. As an example, I typed in southern humorous romance mystery. The list I got included: humorous book, comedy, southern, humor, humor book, humorous books, laugh-out-loud, good humor books, southern humor and a few more. Once the word list appears, it will have the word low listed by the selections. That means your competition is low and those should be good words for you.

www.searchengineland.com/the-giant-list-of-keyword-tools-41678

Now, once you have your words, how do you use them? Use a couple of them in everything you write. For instance on Twitter and Facebook, I post a Talkin’ Twang quote. When I do, I hash tag a couple of my keywords at the end of the quote.

Talkin’ Twang for today: You can tell the minute a man touches you if it’s for his benefit or yours. #southern #humor

When I thank someone for following me, I say. Thanks for following a #Texas girl…or #southern girl.

If you blog or post other places and they have a place for tags, try to use some of your key words. Of course they need to be relevant to your post.

You can also link other sites to your site and that will also help to get people there.

Gee, and you thought writing the book and getting published was the hard part!!

Man, so did I!