March, 2015
Since Tuesday, I have spent some time trying to improve my book sales by using keywords better on my Amazon site.
When I set up the site, I saw that they had seven fields for seven words up to fifty characters long. Mistakenly, I thought you could have only seven keywords, I feel like such a dummy now.
I read two articles today: 7 KINDLE KEYWORDS: USE ALL 50 CHARACTERS OR NOT? and Make Your Book More Discoverable with Keywords. What I took away from these and what I decided to do are two different things.
Below are the things I decided to do. What I took away is not as important as I what I decided to do, so I won’t bother you with that.
First, for Kindlepreneurs, jam as many words into each of the seven boxes Amazon gives you. The maximum number of characters is fifty. I did not see anything that said the words have to be separated by commas.
For keywords, choose words that are not in your title or description. This makes sense because that would be redundant.
Google search engines put more emphasis on the titles and description than keywords. So, maybe it would be good to put any words you would use as keywords in the title and/or description.
Sometimes it might be useful to think of an exact phrase that someone would use in searching for your book and put that in as a keyword. Google search engines sometimes look for that.
I tried to think of as many keywords as I could for my books, but after a few, my imagination was crapping out on me. I came up with an idea to help with this though. This is something not taught in either of the two articles I mentioned. I would think of a word describing the essence of my book, something that people might search for, and looked up its synonyms on line. My reasoning is that words have nuances and the meaning and nuances may vary somewhat from speaker to speaker. For example, someone wanting to read my book Diabolical: Three Stories of Jack Thurston and Revenge (I may change this title to make it more marketable), the primary theme of this book is evil. Thesaurus.com gives 48 synonyms for evil. Therefore, I selected several keywords from this list trying to choose one used widely today such as: wicked, malevolent, depravity, misery, suffering, etc. Then I moved on to another descriptive word and its synonyms. I changed all my keywords on Tuesday and still haven’t seen any results, but it is only Thursday.
Try out some of the suggestions and let me know how they work out for you. Leave any recommendations of your own in the comment box below.
Hasta luego.
Phil Slattery, Writer, Publisher 