Generating even more exposure for your books

It's just a short article today. Well, actually it's hardly an article, it's more of a recommendation. As I've probably mentioned before, estate agents (realtors) say the three most important things about getting the best price for a house is 1) Location 2) Location 3) Location. As authors we have a similar triad, and those three keywords are 1) Exposure 2) Exposure 3) Exposure. The more people see details, reviews, recommendations, covers, you name it, about your book, the more they are likely to buy it. So get yourself interviewed, featured, and blogged about on as many websites as possible. As I mentioned in the previous article - back links to your page improve Goggle PageRank, which in turn makes your page more important for search engines. This too will increase exposure. So this week I recommend you get yourself on the Author Database, or AUTHORSdB to give it its official title. Just click on the link to go straight to the site, and register today. Oh yes, I almost forgot . . . it's FREE!! And on the subject of FREE, I've also placed details of other platforms on my author website, which will promote your book absolutely free of charge.

How to move your Website/Blog up the Google rankings!

OK, so you’ve designed a website/blog, uploaded it onto an Internet server, but when you type the details into Google . . .nothing! It’s nowhere to be seen. Why is this? To start with Google probably hasn’t yet identified that it exists, among the 633 million, or so, websites in the World. The quickest way for Google to find out you have a site, is to tell Google. Sure, it will eventually stumble across your site, but that could take some time. If you visit their submissionpage, you can give them the details they need.

Let’s assume you’ve now done that. How can you stand out in a search among 633 million other sites? One method is to ensure you have keywords embedded in the different pages of your site. As an author, ‘books’ may be one of them. This should be done when the site is developed. However, Google has its own method of determining how important your site is, and it’s called PageRank. It uses a VERY complex algorithm, but it centres around one key aspect – back links to your site. Google consider your site to be more important the more other sites link to your site. And the more sites those sites have, with links back to them, the more important your site will be. If a site with a PageRank of 8/10 links back to your site; that is deemed more important than a site with a PageRank of 1/10.

Every website is given a ranking of 1 to 10 – with the exception of those sites which have so few back links, which then get non-classified, with a ‘N/A’ against their name. eBay.com, for example, has a ranking of 8/10. It gets more and more difficult to move up the rankings, so 10/10 is almost impossible, with only a few sites globally having achieved it. Google.com itself ranks at 9/10. One domain which does achieve the coveted 10/10 ranking is Twitter.com (Facebook.com, even with more users worldwide, trails it with 9/10) So, the more back links you have to your site, particularly from sites with good PageRank scores, the more important your site will appear to Google. To check out your sites PageRank (NB – Each page on your site has its own PageRank score) use the free tool which can be found at the base of my author website home page.