SEO Marketing Tips to Help Get Links to Your Site

By Karen Cioffi

The most effective way to get links to your site as part of your book marketing strategy is through content and SEO marketing.

Here are the four of the most popular SEO marketing content strategies to use:

1. Write keyword rich and quality blog posts and alert your social networks that there’s fresh content on your site. If it’s valuable content, readers will be motivated to share it with their networks, moving it to viral status.

2. Do guest blogging on quality and ‘relevant to your platform’ sites.

3. Post quality and polished content to article directories that other website and blogsite owners will find of value and can post to their sites for free.

When writing for article directories or even guest blogging, make your ‘author bio’ as compelling a possible. You want to get people to click on your link. Your ‘bio’ is just as important as your article content. The reader needs to know that by clicking on your link, she will be benefited with more valuable information.

As an example, Joe Smith could use the following as his author bio:

Joe Smith is a published author, ghostwriter, and freelance writer. Learn more about writing and marketing at www. joesmith.com

It’s not likely that people will really care about what Joe Smith does – what they want is to know what will be in it for them if they click on his link. It’s all about the WITFM (what’s in it for me).

So, a more effective author bio might be:

To learn more about writing and marketing and to pick the must-have ebook, “How to Write and Market Your Way to Success, go to joesmith.com and sign up for his free newsletter, The Writing World.

Do you see and understand the difference? Make the reader want to click on the link.

4. Create and publish informational videos to sites like YouTube. Video marketing is gaining momentum in being a ‘heavy hitter’ for creating visibility and website traffic.

Another strategy to use to get traffic to your site is ‘link bait.’

With this strategy you submit well written and valuable articles to sites like Digg.com and even article directories, such as Ezine Articles. If the article is very informative or entertaining, or the ‘good’ form of controversial, it will get picked up by the site and put on its home page. Now you’re talking lots of visibility and traffic resulting in lots of links.

Most, if not all, of the strategies discussed have the potential to make your content go viral; this generates more visibility and traffic to your website, increasing your links.

There is obviously much more involved in SEO marketing, but this is part of the basics.

Want to learn more about creating and optimizing your author online platform? Check out WOW! Women on Writing’s 6 week e-class: Create and Build Your Author Online Platform.

Image copyright 2013 Karen Cioffi

Book Marketing Using SEO Marketing

By Karen Cioffi

As an author and book marketer, you may be wondering what SEO is. Well, it’s simply an acronym that stands for ‘search engine optimization.’

According to TechTerm.com, “Just about every Webmaster wants his or her site to appear in the top listings of all the major search engines.” SEO is the means to accomplish this.

SEO marketing is the strategies or techniques used to create visibility and website ranking within the search engines, such as Google and Bing. And, even with Google’s latest update, the Penguin’s SHARING factor, these strategies are still effective, and needed.

Sidetracking just a moment, Google’s latest update takes the ‘social’ element of blog posting to the next level. Along with your SEO tweaks, your content must be SHAREABLE.

Content that others find valuable enough to share, whether informative or entertaining, is what will help get a higher ranking with the search engine.

Okay, back on track now.

Every online marketing strategy includes promotion, and SEO marketing is a promotional tool under the marketing umbrella. The marketing umbrella covers the creation or manufacturing of a product or service, research and development (R&D), distribution, and any other elements needed to get a product from creation to the consumer. Promotion creates visibility, which in turn leads website traffic and customers.

Utilizing online promotion means you will be using the internet and search engines. SEO marketing is the process of getting the search engines to find and rank your website and your content. You obviously want a high ranking so when a searcher (potential customer) types in a search term (keyword), your site may be one of those on that first search engine results page (SERP), or at least within the first few pages.

Another explanation of SEO marketing:

It is basically the steps you take to have Google, Bing, and other search engines find, index, and put your website on one of their first SERPs whenever people use ‘your keyword’ to search for something.

In essence, SEO marketing is kind of a popularity contest.
When you use effective keywords within your website (title and meta tags) and in informative posting content, Google and the other search engines will find, index, and rank you. This allows you to be picked up and shown on the search engines’ results pages for specific search terms. When a ‘searcher’ finds your link on the SERP and clicks on it, you get a link to your site. The more inbound links to your site – relevant to your keywords or not - the more Google and other search engines ‘like you’ and consider you an authority.

Going a bit further, getting links from other sites with the same keywords in their links that you have in yours, is much better. This is considered as a higher ‘ranking vote’ by Google and establishes your site as having more authority. The more ‘link votes’ you get, the more Google will perceive your site as valuable and give you a higher authoritative ranking.

To be found and ranked by Google, you need to add effective and relevant keywords to your site and content. To do this, you’ll need to do a bit of research. You can type a keyword in the Google search box or the Amazon search box and see what keywords they bring up. This will give you an idea if your keyword is effective.

Using relevant and effective keywords is essential in SEO marketing.

What strategies do you use to find effective keywords as part of your book marketing efforts?

Image copyright 2013 Karen Cioffi

Need help with your author online platform? Need to boost visibility and traffic to your site? Check out WOW! Women on Writing’s 6 week e-class:Create and Build Your Author Online Platform

And, for more writing and marketing tips visit http://karencioffiwritingandmarketing.com