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Let’s face it, if people already know you and read your books, they are going to look for your website by searching for Jane Smith writer. Or Jane Smith author. They’ll find you. But what about attracting NEW readers? Readers who don’t already know your name or read your books? This is where your blog comes in. Attract more readers to your blog through search engine traffic.

You might decide to try and attract people searching for paranormal authors. Okay, let’s look at that. You can use the Wordtracker Free keyword suggestion tool. Type in paranormal authors.

Look, paranormal ROMANCE authors get searched for more than paranormal authors. If you write paranormal romance, it would make more sense to target the higher searched for term.

Well, let’s look at paranormal WRITER in comparison

Paranormal Romance Writer gets searched for more than just paranormal writer. And you can see that paranormal romance WRITER gets searched for more than paranormal romance AUTHOR.

Now let’s go to google and look at the competition for those two key words:

Go to google and in their search bar type in “paranormal romance writer” (with the quotes). Here you can see how many sites come up for that specific search term.

This part tells you how many pages Google has for this search term:

Do the same for “paranormal romance author”

Ideally you’re looking for the term that has the highest number of searches, and the lowest number of pages listed in Google. There isn’t that much difference between these two. Since paranormal romance writer has more searches, I’d go with that. Later you might want to try and target the second term.

Be creative on terms that apply to your writing. Research them with both the keyword researcher and look them up on Google. (be sure to use the quotes around your search term). Try and find a term that has a high search number and lower Google page number. How about historical author, historical romance writer, romantic suspense writer, New Orleans author. Do your keyword research and look up the number of pages each term has on Google. Pick a keyword term and go after it.

Now, how do you target that term? For starters:

You can add it to your Blog Name. Like Jane Smith Paranormal Romance Writer…instead of naming your blog Jane Smith’s Blog. In Wordpress, in the admin panel go to Options, General, to change your blog name.

Get anchor text in backlinks to your site using your keyword term. (the words that are usually in blue and underlined in hyperlinks) When people link back to your site, if they use the term “paranormal romance writer” or “jane smith paranormal romance writer” you’ll get more “juice” to the keyword you’re targeting. So if you link to your site from other places, you can also use the anchor text of paranormal romance writer.

Put a link back to your home page from every page of your blog using your keyword term. This could a link in your footer or in your sidebar.

Use the term in some of your blog post titles and in actual posts. Make it seem natural.

Add the keywords to your meta tags in your header. For most wordpress themes, this would mean editing your header.php file. There are also Wordpress Plugins that will do this. I’ll be discussing some Wordpress Plugins that are available to help optimize your site in a future post.

For now, how about picking another keyword term to expand your target market from Jane Smith author? Pick a keyword term and go after it. See if you can hit the first page of Google results.

And if you’ve decided to expand your blog past just a writer blog, such as Suzanne suggested here, the sky is the limit! Figure out your keyword and target it.

If you have any questions, just drop a comment below.

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Tags: How to Blog, Marketing, Website Tips, Wordpress //