How to Promote Your Book by Writing Effective Titles for Your Articles and Blog Posts

Writing articles and blog posts is a terrific way to promote your book. The title of an article affects its ranking in search engines and influences how many people click through to the article from a search engine results page or take time to read a post on your blog. Here are some tips for creating great titles.

1. Do your keyword research first.  Keywords are the words and phrases that people use to search for your topic on a search engine like Google. I use the Google Keyword Tool to create keyword lists for topics that I write about. For example, I have lists of keywords related to book marketing, book promotion, authors, book publishing, etc. 

It's tempting to select the most popular keywords, but you may be better off selecting keywords with less competition (fewer searches and fewer competing pages.)  One easy way to find out how many other Web pages are using a particular keyword is to type the keyword (in "quotes") into a search engine and see how many pages it brings up.  For example, "book promotion" gets 118,800 annual searches, but there are 876,000 competing pages (seven pages for every search) while "promoting your book" gets 15,600 searches but has only 31,500 competing pages (two pages for every search.)

 

2. Determine the primary keyword phrase for your article and use it in the title of the article, and then use it again several times in the body of the article. You may want to select a secondary keyword to use in the article as well. For maximum search engine optimization value, use the primary keyword at the beginning of the title. The first three to five words are most important. Here is an example for the "promote your book" keyword:

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3. Consider using a compound title, containing two different phrases. This lets you get your most important keyword up front and perhaps repeat certain words. The experts at ezinearticles.com recommend longer article titles, with 50 characters or more. If you need to use punctuation in the title, use a hyphen rather than a colon. For example:

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4.  Many people use the words "how to" when searching on search engines. Capitalize on those searches with a how to title.

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5. Use the magic of numbers combined with keywords.

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6. State the benefit to the reader.

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7. Identify your audience.

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8. Be clear rather than cute. It's important that your title convey what the article is actually about, and sometimes it's more important to appeal to your audience than to search engines. For example, instead of "The Magic of Twitter" or "Promote Your Book with Twitter," this title is more appealing:

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Or, you could make this into a longer, compound title with keywords:

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Next time you write an article or blog post, take a little extra time to craft a title that will appeal to search engines and to readers.

Comments

[Stas Antons]

Good pointers, I think they apply to any promotion, not just books.
One of the key takeaways for me is keep it simple, as in: "Be clear rather than cute".
Thank you,
Stas
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[Karen Cioffi]

These are great tips. I've been doing this a while and still haven't tried the Google Keyword Tool. I will try it soon.

Thanks.

[judy cullins]

Hi Dana,
Glad to see a discussion on key words in blog titles. I used to research them for long-tail,low competition,but found more recently,that my blog posts are doing so well with Google ranking, and results of 35% improved targeted web trafficlast month from them, that I am skipping the key word focus for now. What do you think of this idea?

[Dana]

Judy, I know you are an expert in article marketing, so it's interesting to hear your perspective. If your traffic from search engines is rising rapidly, you're obviously doing something right! Search engines use other factors, such as the number of incoming links to the site, the age of the site and the frequency of updates to the site, so maybe some other factors are driving your search results right now. Using keywords in your posts might increase traffic even more. If you are short on time, you might keyword optimize just your most important posts.

Keyword research can be time consuming at first, but most experts tend to write about some the same topics repeatedly, so you can build up a nice keyword list over time for quick reference. I keep my keyword list in a spreadsheet, with each major topic on a separate tab.

Thanks for sharing!
Dana

[Karen Cioffi]

I like the idea of using compound titles with keywords. Thanks for the useful information.

[Mystery Author Billie A Williams]

Wow where have I been - your site is so packed with good information I've been absorbed with it most of the day = ) Thanks!
Billie

[Dana Lynn Smith]

Thanks so much Billie - I'm glad that you find The Savvy Book Marketer helpful.

[Allister Sinclair]

Good information. The numbers part seems especially true. I dont know why, but people like to click those titles with numbers.

[Dana Lynn Smith]

Yes Allister, it's funny how people are drawn to numbers - it seems they want a solution to their problem in 5 easy steps! Numbers can work well in nonfiction book titles too.