What users search for?

[Xeon]

Hi! I've completed my book and is now getting it online, on my website.

Iin order for seach engines to list and find our sites easier and give it higher rankings, I need to enter relevant keywords on my web pages.

Now, assume that my site is all about my book. My book is a fiction book, based loosely on certain facts of Norse mythology. It is fantasy cum funny action rolled into one.

Thus, if you're someone looking for such books, what would you type in the search engines? Like "Fantasy novels"? Or "Humour novels", or "Funny fantasy fiction books" etc.?
I'm not sure of the terms people would use in this scenario, so I'm doing a little test here and hope to get everyone's input as much as possible.

Thanks a lot!
Xeon.

 

[demetrio]

Is it a published book with a support website, or is the entire book available on the website?

 

[Xeon]

Hi Demetrio,

It is a real book with a supporting website.

Thanks,
Xeon.

 

[Stewart]

Given the content of your site, the metadata (i.e. keywords) that I'd use to aid optimisation would be fiction, Norse, fantasy, humour, adventure, and author.

However, keywords are largely ignored by the big search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. Their use is more legacy for older or less known search engines.

What you really have to do to ensure a good ranking is garner links to your site - especially links from very good sources. This is what 'mostly' drives a page's Google Page Rank.

Things to look out for:

• Have you given each page an informative title?
• Does your title contain contextual keywords? i.e. My Site Name - The home page of fantasy novellist Xeon
• Have you used appropriate header tags in your (X/D)HTML to reinforce the keyword heavy page title? i.e. About Xean
• If providing links, can you ensure that they are not to dead sites?
• If linking to another page ensure that your link is as close as possible to the other page's title - that's when good things happen
• Have you provided a site map? Search engines like it when they can get to all the content from one page
• Have you given your images alt tags?
• Have you given your links title properties?

If you want, you can PM me the site and I can have a look at it.

 

[demetrio]

You are not going to be able to get a page or site that is just about you and your books to rank that highly for such generic keywords. As Stewart said, SEs ignore meta keywords (but not descriptions!) so your best bet is for links but not so much for the PR they give but for the traffic. Have your book reviewed at online sites, give interviews, post in forums.

The suggestions Stewart gave will help you in making your website more accessible, but don't expect to be bringing in people from search engines unless they are specifically searching for you.

 

[Xeon]

Thanks a lot for your reply, Stewart and Demetrio! I'll take them into account.

See ye',
Xeon.