There was a time when I very innocently believed that the best title would be a title that no one would ever have thought of prior to reading my book. But today with the internet and search engines dominating the market, that does not seem to be the case.
Look and see what Google dredged up when I tried to use Vacuum County, the title of one of my novels, as a search term!
Since then, I have become a little more savvy in choosing titles. Here is a video that explains my thinking on this topic.
My latest book, Theodosia and the Pirates, is beginning to dominate the search phrase “Theodosia and the Pirates”. For instance, this morning’s search on DuckDuckGo, put my book above the Wikipedia article about Theodosia Burr Alston, the historical person who is the subject of my book.
I like to use DuckDuckGo rather than Google, because Google tries to find out who you are and then gear its search results to what you are interested in. But when we are trying to gauge the effectiveness of our search engine optimization strategy, we don’t want to see results geared specifically toward us. Instead, we want to see what the average person would see. DuckDuckGo does not care who is searching, so their results are pretty objective.
But the problem is, not everybody has discovered DuckDuckGo as a search engine. So sometimes it helps to open an “incognito” window on your Chrome browser and get a more objective reading from Google. Here is what I found on Google while going incognito this morning.
The Google results are pretty good, too. My old book trailer ranks highest, followed by the Amazon listing for the paperback, followed by the Kindle edition, followed by the Wikipedia entry on the real Theodosia. And even better: after the Wikipedia entry comes my blog post from the CS blog.
Of course, ranking for a particular long tail keyword will not in and of itself guarantee you sales, particularly if no one is searching for that keyword. But it is definitely a start.
For more book marketing tips, please consider the following articles.
Articles about How to Market Your Book
http://www.inverteda.com/blog/what-you-can-do-help-market-your-book
http://aya-katz.hubpages.com/hub/Searching-for-a-Better-Search-Engine
Books by Aya Katz
