SEO for Book Bloggers

How to Improve SEO for Book Reviews

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a huge role in the success of individual blog posts and your blog as a whole. Book blogging is no exception. In this post we'll be looking at ways to make sure your book reviews are SEO friendly. 

Google wants to find blog posts that deliver what they promise in their titles. SEO is therefore important to your search engine ranking. In the case of book reviews your keyword focus is probably on the title of the book. 

You might also like: The Ultimate Guide for Book Bloggers

Where to insert your keywords

The title of the post

Your title is one of the most important pieces of your SEO game. Make sure it's crystal clear what your blog post is about by inserting the book title of the book you are reviewing in the title of the post. 

The permalink

It's a good idea to have the name of the book appear in the permalink for the blog post too.

The body of the post

The more comprehensive, informative, and useful your blog post is the better it should appear in search engine results. Book reviews are no different to other content. 

Use headings and sub-heading with your keywords in your book review, and make sure your blog post is optimised for readability. Users don’t always read the entire article. They scan the information to find the interesting bits. Keeping your sentences short, and using fewer sentences per paragraph makes your content easy to scan.

Another way to improve readability is to make sure you have plenty of white space on the page and use a font that is easy on the eyes. 

The meta description

The meta description is an HTML meta tag that you can add to any page. It provides a short description of your article for search engines and other crawlers.

The character limit for meta description is 150 so make sure you include your keywords early on in the description.

The post labels/tags

Categories and tags help sort your content not only for yourself, but also for your readers and search engines.

Don't forget to add related keywords too. These might be:

• The author name
• The Publisher
• The genre
• The series name
• Other books by the same author
• Tropes
• Character types

You might also like: Ways To Write More Creative Book Reviews

The images

1. Make sure the images you use are optimised for the web. Images increase your overall load time and take longer to load than plain text. As search engines often rank faster websites higher you need to make sure your images aren't too big. A file size below 70kb is what you should be aiming for.

For more detailed information about Image optimization for SEO check out this article by Search Engine Watch with basic image optimization tips that anyone can apply for any type of site.

2. Alt text is also crucial for image SEO as it helps search engines understand the context of the image. Usually, the alt text is not visible on your website but it accompanies images in Google image search which helps users understand the image and improves your chances of getting more visitors. The more descriptive your alt text the better. 

3. Be descriptive with the file names of your images too and make sure you include your keywords e.g. Percy-Jackson-Bookcover.jpeg is better than DSC01234.jpeg

Internal links to related content

Adding internal links in your blog post is a great way to develop a relationship between new and older blog posts. It also allows you to pass link juice to your older posts. 

Do you spend time to SEO your book reviews? Got more tips on how to improve SEO for book reviews? 

Join the Blog Audit Challenge 2021 for monthly tasks on how you can improve your blog. It's completely free and you can join in at any time throughout the year.