Subtitles

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Write Subtitles for the Search Engine

Do you want search engines to send people to your site? Then pay attention to your subtitles of your fiction.

Subtitles aren’t always used for a novel, but they have become increasing important because of search engines. For non-fiction, authors try to pack the subtitle with every keyword for which a person might search.
Until late 2013, Google provided a free Keyword Tool to help you find key words for a specific title. Now, you must try other tools. Here are 2 free tools that don’t require you to set up an account. Each will give you slightly different answers, so you may want use both for the same project.

  1. Wordstream Free Keyword Tool: you get 30 free searches at a time. Lots of ads. But the resulting keywords look good.
  2. SEOBook Keyword Tool: This one gives reasonable keyword list and ou can export as .csv (for a spreadsheet).

For example, I wrote a children’s picture book with the title 19 GIRLS AND ME. It’s the story of friendship in a kindergarten class with 19 girls–and one lone boy. Unfortunately, I get many hits from people looking for pornography for 19 girls. If the book had a subtitle, that would have protected it from the wrong sort of search. I wish I had given my picture book with this subtitle:
19 Girls and Me: A tale of kindergarten friendship.

That subtitle would have meant that it would be easier for kindergarten teachers to find the book for the beginning of the school year. And it would have kept out the wrong sort of person. Take these things into account and give your book a subtitle that will help it get found in search engines.

1 Comment
  • darkocean
    November 6, 2014

    A subtitle can also be: Book one: the finders Stone Trilogy it doesn’t have to e a short description of the book it self. In saying that your book is a series readers that are interested might just go and look for the rest of the series too. I know I did.
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