Book Blogging 101

SEO for Book Bloggers

Disclosure: The FTC Disclosure Provision is a law that requires influencers to disclose when they are being paid to promote a product or service. So please know that if I'm not making money through affiliate links/sponsored content on the post you're currently reading, it's an oversight on my part and will be corrected soon. Read the full disclosure about all the legal stuff here.

Want to drive more traffic to your book blog? Invest some time in SEO!

Unlike social media traffic where you have to constantly be actively posting links to promote your blog content, search engine traffic is passive and long term. This means that it's a much better return on investment (ROI). It doesn't matter how long ago you created your blog post. It can always rank in search engine results and therefore pull in new traffic to your book blog.

It's time to make organic search your biggest source of traffic to your book blog!

You might also like: SEO for Book Bloggers: How to Improve SEO for Book Reviews

What is SEO?

What are the different methods of SEO?

What are the different types of SEO?

A good SEO strategy brings in high traffic to your book blog. The more optimised your blog post is, the higher its chances of getting traffic from search engines like Google. The goal is to have your blog post show up on the first page of results when people search on a particular topic. 

For example, this blog post is about SEO for book bloggers and offers a checklist to help book bloggers better understand the sorts of things they should be doing to improve the SEO of their book blogs. Keywords for this post would therefore be things like "SEO Checklist for Book Bloggers" or "SEO for Book Bloggers" or "SEO Checklist for Blog Posts" as these are the sorts of phrases people will be putting into the search bar when looking for content.

How to use SEO as a book blogger

SEO Checklist for Book Bloggers

Further questions about SEO for Book Blogs

Blog Audit Challenge 2021

June Link Up

You might also like: The Social Media Audit Challenge 2021

Don't forget to promote your participation in the Blog Audit Challenge 2021 by using the following graphic in any blog posts you do connected with the challenge along with a link back to this site. 

Don't forget to drop by the other links to show your support. 

Ways To Improve Your Blog DA Score

How to Boost Domain Authority

This post may contain affiliate links. Meaning, I get a commission if you purchase through my links, at no cost to you. Read the full disclosure here.

What is Domain Authority?

Domain authority (DA) refers to the number of relevant links to your website from other reputable sites. The relevance of those backlinks also contributes to your score.

Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). A Domain Authority score ranges from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank. - Moz

How to check your DA Score

You can check your DA score (and that of other sites if you want to see how your site compares to your competition) by using the free tools at https://moz.com/free-seo-tools.

What is a Good Domain Authority Score? 

Domain authority scores range from one to 100. When you have a higher domain authority score, it’s more likely you’ll see increases in web traffic and Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) rankings. 

When you create a new website, its domain authority is one. It gets harder to increase your DA as your score gets higher so it's significantly easier to grow your score from 20 to 30 than it is to grow from 70 to 80.

As a book blogger a DA score of 30 can be considered good. 

You might also like: SEO for Book Bloggers: How to Improve SEO for Book Reviews

How Can You Raise Your Domain Authority Score? 

So what can you do to increase the DA score for your blog? 

The good news is that there's actually a few things you can do to raise your DA.

1. Write quality content. 

You want to give other sites a reason to link to yours. Work to provide better information on your niche than your competitors do. 

The quality of the content you share is the biggest ranking factor of all for both on-page and off-page SEO. So if you improve the overall SEO of your blog, your DA score should also improve. 

• Optimise titles and Descriptions 
• Use Headings (H1 and H2) within your content 
• URL structure and SEO optimise permalinks
• Optimise your images, videos, and other media elements 
• Use keywords naturally in your content (no keyword stuffing) 
• Add internal links to your content 
• Format your content in a way that increases your chances of ranking in Google’s featured snippets
• The faster your site loads, the lower the bounce rate. If your site is fast, you have a better chance of ranking on Google over slow sites that drive high bounce rates.
• Make sure your site is mobile friendly. The best way to start is to go to Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test and run the test for your domain. Google will give you a nice report with recommendations on how to make your website mobile ready.

As you grow your reputation as an authority in your niche, you’ll strengthen the identity of your brand. This not only helps increase traffic but also increases the number of external links you earn from other high-quality sources.

The more content you create regularly, the more likely you are to rank.

2. Get quality backlinks

The better your backlinks are, the better your chances are at increasing your blog DA. Domain authority is determined on a logarithmic scale. This means each singular metric won’t always increase or decrease the score to the same degree. The more important a metric is, the greater effect it’s likely to have.

The more sites with higher DA scores that link to your blog the better it is for your own DA score. 

So how do you get people to include a backlink to your site on theirs?

• Guest posting. Being a guest on other sites helps get your name and site out there. Usually when you provide a guest post for a site they will include a backlink to your site in the post. 
• Blogger outreach. Contact bloggers or websites running weekly or monthly roundups. Contact them with a link to one of your blog posts. If they think it's a useful resource they might include in in their next round up post. 
• Write testimonials. As long as it's an honest review, in that you use their site/products, giving a testimonial can be a great way to be featured on someones site. There is a high possibility that they will include a backlink along with the testimonial when they post it to their site. 
• Get interviewed. Look for websites that do interview features and tell them that you would like to participate. Let them know what knowledge you can contribute. 
• Web directories. Submit your site url to web directories.
• Find broken links. You can check the broken backlinks of sites in your niche, notify them, and offer them a link to relevant content from your site that would make a good alternative. 

Raising your DA is a long-term process so you'll need to be patient. It usually takes a few weeks before you'll see any change in your ranking. 

You might also like: Book Blogger Collaboration Ideas

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.