Link Anchor Text
One of the single largest mistakes that authors make when starting to seek "other" websites to link to their ebook website is an ignorance of the use of what is called "anchor text".
I have written about the importance of using proper anchor text in links from others sites back to your site.
In this article on how Anchor Text Can Rocket Your Rankings, Garrett French outlines an excellent series of tips and advice on how to setup your site as well as having outside websites to link to your site.
No matter what your view of how the search engines do or do not use anchor text in their algorithms, having proper anchor text links inside your site and point to it from other sites is considered a "best practice" by every experienced webmaster.
You can find more info on this topic by clicking the Search Engine Optimization link to the left of this article.
Discover eBook Topic Demand
One of the regular requests I receive at Knowledge Download is this:
"I am an expert in XX and I wonder if you think there is a market for an ebook in that field".
My usual first response is: You are the expert in XX, not me. Is there demand for info on your topic?
Finding out potential market size is a very wise task to do prior to writing your ebook. A wide and deep market may be good or bad, as may be too narrow of a market.
A good tool to use, and one which I use to do market research is Good Keywords. Find it here:
http://www.goodkeywords.com/
It's a free tool. You can enter various keyword combinations and check various search engines to get a sense of how many searches for any particular keyword combo.
I mainly use the Overture US section.
The number of searches will tell you, in rough terms, potential demand for your topic. Also, the tool will give you a lot of secondary word combos that you may not have considered.
If there are several thousand total searches for all keyword combinations or phrases, you may reasonably assume there is demand for your topic.
Remember, you are only checking one search engine. You can probably multiply the total searches for your phrase by a factor of 2 or 3 to account for Yahoo, Google, MSN, AOL and others.
One other major benefit of Good Keywords is that all of the keyword phrase alternatives are great for putting in your website page titles, meta description and meta keywords.
Populating your web site and pages with multiple sets of keyword phrases will give you a higher liklihood of being found by one or most of the top search engines.
THAT is one key way to help grow sales of your self-published ebook!
Good luck!
eBook Website URL Choices
Well, I've finally come across something that I never in my wildest imagination would have thought of.
This article from news.com tells of how Google and other search engines are applying filters that may harm your chance of gaining search engine referred visitors.
The idea is that Google's filter is designed to exclude websites who have the letter combinations that represent porn, gambling or other illicit trades.
The first example is PartsExpress.com. Contained in their domain name are the letters "sex".
Apparently that is cause enough for Google to exclude PartsExpress.com from the Google database entirely.
That's pretty harsh, but one must understand how / why something like this can happen.
Simply put, computer software is nothing but a set of "rules". Meaning, a line of code in Google's filter may say:
If "letters" = "sex"
Then *exclude*
Well, you can pretty quickly see how your choice of a domain name could possibly eliminate your prospects of ever getting traffic from search engines for your ebook website.
If you haven't selected your domain name yet, be careful. If you have a domain, be sure to examine it in light of that article. You may need to buy a new domain and start over.
But I can tell you that such an effort is worthwhile. Nearly 80% of our business comes from search engine referrals.
eBook Web Site Optimization
In the continuing effort to help authors grow their ebook website traffic, I have attempted to teach and share articles on various aspects of optimizing your ebook web site so you move up search engine results and thereby gain more targeted traffic.
This article on Anchor Text Optimization by Jagdeep.S. Pannu does a fabulous job of explaining the need to have anchor text that overlays the links to and from your site.
The short version: the search engines like Google usually take into account the words in anchor text to factor in what words to index your site for.
When you requests other sites to link to your site, make sure you take your most targeted keywords to use in the anchor text for maximum value.
Best of luck - and good selling!
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eBook Website Linking
I have spent most of the month of March on optimizing your ebook website for higher search engine rankings.
The reason is simple: from my experience working with dozens of authors who use our service and software to build their ebook websites, the two most common problems they all have is:
1. Lack of long term marketing and selling effort (more than a year)
2. Little knowledge of how to get traffic to their site.
Since search engines are so significant, or can be, to get traffic to your site, it is critical that you spend a certain amount of time each day or week on linking, optimizing, testing and tuning.
I have recently come across Ken McGaffin's website and his Linking Matters Special Reports.
As Ken has devoted this entire site to website linking, I thought you might want to take some time to review his special reports, his articles and concepts. Once you have done that, be sure to get into action with your own linking campaign.
Take the long view and trust me when I tell you, the longer your website exists, the more traffic you will gain from search engines.
As for converting those visitors into $ales, be sure to read yesterday's blog article.
Devote 10 or 15 minutes a day to your linking strategy. That is much easier than trying to spend 3 or 4 hours every week on Saturday.
Good luck and feel free to contact me if you have any questions or would be interested in help with your linking plan.
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eBook Website Optimization
Ok, so you're not going to let me get away with just telling you to go to a search engine and find out how to write page titles and meta.
Here is an excellent article on writing solid page Titles and meta tags.
The author takes you through some basics and gives you solid info on how to do this work.
It's not hard, just a bit time consuming.
However it is necessary if you have any aspirations of having your eBook website found in the search engines. And it's mandatory to learn and do if you plan on having your eBook website rank high in search results.
Good luck!
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Search Engine PPC Fraud
For our eBook authors who are trying innovative methods to acquire visitors and customers, you may have ventured into the Pay Per Click search engine advertising game.
I call it a game, because it is one of the fastest ways to drain your credit limit if you aren't very, very careful.
Four years ago, I built my first personal website. While I was managing web developers, software engineers and project managers, I hadn't the faintest idea of doing my own website.
So I bought MS FrontPage, a 4 inch book on it at Amazon and off I went.
The site featured some products that I wanted to sell as a reseller. I controlled the inventory and ordering process so I just wanted visitors and sales.
I wrote decent sales copy and hoisted up a PPC campaign at (then known as) Goto.com, now known as Overture / Yahoo.
Unbeknown to me, I was in for a real education. Inside of 5 days, I had a $500 charge on my credit card. Not a single sale.
I was ignorant and foolish. I also believe I was a victim of what is known as "click fraud".
I learn fast though.
Fast forward to last year. My partner and I decided to launch a new website and use PPC. I was leary and just wanted to optimize the site for organic search results. He convinced me otherwise as he had written a nice software tool that captured every IP address and domain name for every click coming into our site, on our site and leaving our site.
We used FindWhat for our PPC program and had, thanks to Dave's tool, a 45% click fraud rate. We had the data and provided it to them. It was shocking to tell the truth. FindWhat gave us back that portion of our investment, but once it was used up, we closed the PPC campaign.
This discussion forum thread talks about PPC issues, specifically the recent Google legal case and other matters, including click fraud.
Spend some time reading that thread and the associated links therein before you launch a PPC campaign. Otherwise, you could very well be foolish and ignorant, and you might as well just make a cash contribution to the American Red Cross.
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Keyword Intelligence
For eBook authors trying to market through or on the Internet, you must know who your target audience is and reach them to achieve online sales without "bricks and mortar" marketing.
One of the ways to discover and target your market is to do keyword research. There are a lot of keyword research tools on the Internet.
But how do you know where you stack up against them in the search engines?
One way is to manually input your keyword phrases in a search engine and note what websites rank in what positions.
That takes a lot of time and effort, to say the least. Most eBook authors I talk to are not willing to put in THAT kind of effort.
So their sites languish, gather few sales and they give up.
Don't be one of them.
Learn how to write page titles, meta descriptions, meta keywords and on page elements. Again, search for the keyword phrases in the prior sentence to find websites that will teach you how to do that. There are hundreds or perhaps thousands of websites to do that.
But, once you get your website optimized, then tracking and tuning your position in a search engine becomes one of your key activities.
Google Alert is one tool that can help you monitor and track what websites rank in what position and which ones change. Google Alert does this each day, so your intelligence is fairly real time.
I've been using Google Alert for about 6 months now to track some keyword phrases in a certain market where I have a website that generates revenue for me.
Google Alert will send you emails whenever there are new sites entering the top rankings for your chosen keywords.
Go sign up for an account and start tuning your website!
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eBook Websites
It has come to my attention that a lot of our readers and ebook authors are still in the early stages of learning how to optimize their websites for search engine benefit.
One of the simplest things you can do is to create a site map of your ebook website.
A site map is simply a list of all the pages, or major pages of your web site.
The Knowledge Download site map gives you a good example.
You'll notice that on every page of the KD site, in the bottom footer I have a link to, among other key html pages, our site map.
On the site map I've put all the major pages that I want to make sure the search engines find and spider.
The site map is an easy way to create a simple list of html pages with appropriate "anchor text".
To ensure the search engines find all the pages you want them to find, create yourself a site map and link to the site map from every page.
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eBook Websites & Yahoo Search Engine
Now comes the beginning of a very challenging period for people in what is called the "search engine optimization" field, or also known as search engine marketing consulting.
In this thread on WebProWorld, comes very strong suggestions, in part with some emails and posts from Yahoo representatives, that websites promoting affiliate programs will be banned from the new Yahoo search engine.
That ban would be on both the spider and results index databases.
It's official and painful: optimizing your eBook website for Google is going to get you entirely different results on Yahoo.
When MSN comes out with their new search engine later this year, you will have three major search engines to contend with.
The smart money suggests to build and optimize your ebook website for the search engine who will:
a) be easiest to optimize for
b) deliver you the most qualified traffic
Most of us will begin to specialize, as it will be simply too hard to reverse engineer, then build an ebook website for all these major players.
As for the Yahoo ban on sites with lots of affiliate links, if you are such a webmaster, you might as well get rid of the affiliate links, unless you are a heavy email marketer.
Google has made it known for 5 months (well, Google hasn't said squat, but it's message forum fodder and tested by some well respected SEO guru's) that Google has been penalizing sites with a lot of affiliate links.
For you newcomers, the reason for all this is for those search engines to "force" you to buy pay per click ads on their sites. Basically they have cut off the "free" traffic for affiliate selling websites.
For those of us who are info producers versus affiliate promoters, this is not bad news. I do have a website that we use affiliate marketing to generate traffic and sales. So for us, likely it means our affiliates won't be delivering much anymore.
The web is changing again and for ebook authors and promoters, it's time to start changing with it!
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