An Effective Website is a Basic Tool to Promote Your Book

By Charles Jacobs

When planning your book promotion program, it is essential to create a welcoming, informative website. It will serve as the home base from which you send out your publicity and to which others can respond with either questions or a desire to discover more about you and the book you are promoting.

Most important for published authors, it also serves as your private bookstore where they can purchase copies of your book or of any other items or services that you offer.

The goal of your website design reaches far beyond simply looking pretty, although that is important in attracting visitors. But the true magnet that will make your site the first stop for surfers seeking knowledge is content. It must be rich in information and organized in a way that makes it easy to digest.

Attracting Visitors

You have a public of almost 150 million computer literate people in the United States alone. But remember everything you enter on the Web can reach millions more around the globe. They too turn to their computers for information.

Today, the Internet has become the first place the majority of journalists look when seeking information for a story they are creating. The latest study conducted by Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism stated that 98% of working reporters and editors head to the Web to research facts and interview experts. Your goal is to become one of those experts by creating a meaningful Press Room on your site that will bring journalists back again and again.

Journalists aren't the only visitors who are usually in a hurry. Most surfers are as they search for material that will benefit them directly. They rapidly screen the Web looking for the most informative and accurate sources. Their options are myriad, as you will discover if you enter the subject you write about into a major search engine. Thousands of sites will emerge.

The challenge you face is to stand out above those others, and there are several ingredients that will help you accomplish that. Of course, the primary element is quality content. Information that provides something of worth to your visitor.

The second ingredient is an awareness and a use of Search Engine Optimization to help you move you up the ladder to the first-or at least the second-page of your subject's listings on the search engines.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

You know from your own experience that the way you find sources of information on the Internet is to create a phrase or even choose just a single word and enter it into your favorite search engine. Obviously, others-whether surfers, journalists, scholars or students-use the same technique when seeking information.

But for them to find your site, you must include those keywords and key phrases in a prominent position on your site. The search engines send out digital "scouts" that are called "spiders" to search the Web and record the principal words and phrases used by thousands of web sites. That way, when a surfer enters a keyword, the search engine includes your site among the listings it offers.

The additional benefit you will receive from using keywords effectively is that you will climb to a higher level on the search engine listings.

You will find as you begin to use keywords that companies like Google, Wordtracker and others maintain records of how often and the ways in which a keyword is used. Google's AdWord Keyword Tool is free to use. Wordtracker offers a trial period, but then charges if you continue to use it.

For example, you might want to use a word like "book" or "writing," if those are your subjects. A search will show that perhaps a million web sites around the world are using that keyword, so the chances of your reaching page one status on the engine is slim.

You also will find as number of related phrases or words on the Google or Wordtracker list that are directly relevant to your subject.

You can then become more precise and narrow down the field by adding another word or two. For example, you might qualify by adding qualifiers like "nonfiction" or perhaps an additional word like "political" or "historical" or "academic" to your base word "book." Similarly with a popular word like writing, you might add article or essay or even book or nonfiction book. So a person searching for help in creating a history might enter "writing a nonfiction history book." It's just as simple as that, although there are additional facets to SEO that space will not allow me to describe.

Just always remember that your web site is the give and take of your discussions and your book sales. If that base is direct, easy to understand and chock full of solid information combined with an ample sprinkling of keywords, you will find your site rising rapidly on the engines. Before long you will thrill to the fact you are on page one. Believe me, you will be able to tell from the sudden increase in visitors to your site.

About the Author:

Author, book coach and writing instructor is currently awaiting galleys for his new book on promotion. His latest, "The Writer Within You," has been named by seven organizations as a BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR. Information about the book and how to buy it can be found at http://www.retireandwrite.com.