Writing a Book Review - Choosing Keywords
Step 1. The Easy and Obvious first
Clearly there are some really obvious keywords your pretty much obligated to use if you want to attract traffic to your book review. Let's list them here to make sure you've got most of them locked down:
- Book Title
- Book Author (and any co-authors)
- Book Illustrator (and any co-illistrators)
- Book Publisher
- Book editor (if one is listed)
- the Edition of the book you're reviewing
- If the book is part of a Series, include that too
- Names of the Main Characters
- Genre/Industry
- Niche, Sub-Genre or Specialty
- Date the book was published
Step 2. Less Obvious Keywords
Some of these keywords and keyphrases might be obvious to some, while they may be complete surprises to others. Either way, I've found them generally useful for increasing traffic.
- Chapter names
- Quotes from main characters
- Inspirational quotes from inspirational characters
- Quotes from the author (usually for non-fiction books)
- "How to's" (If the book you reviewed teaches something, then the keyphrase would be "how to do house painting", or "how to build a birdhouse", etc...)
- "How do you's" (the theory is the same as the "how to's" keyphrases)
- "Where can I find..." ("books about business"...)
- "Did you know..." ("that painting can be easier if you..")
Step 3. Reach Further
You'll want to be careful about not using too many keywords and keyphrases, though if you have the room for a few more keywords or keyphrase's, you can reach further out to a wider audience and help create that evergreen review that helps keep a book relevant.
Try creating some extra tags out of:
- Similar Genre's
- Similar Subjects or Industries
- Tie it into educational subjects that people might seek out later for research
- Connect the book to any cliche's, rationalizations or stereotypes that are relevant
- Research the main demographic of people that have abundantly purchased the book you reviewed or books in similar genres/categories and use targeted keywords and keyphrases that they commonly use when searching for information
- List the price range and direct price of the book you review, as well as using keyphrases like "books for less than $xx" or "books about xxxx xxxx for less than $xx".