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Give Your Books an Online Makeover
Book discovery is much more than placing at the top of Google website search results. Diversify your online presence so your books get the best possible exposure.
 by Deltina Hay, IBPA board member
Here are some pre-session tips from Deltina Hay who is presenting at IBPA Publishing University in Chicago with fellow IBPA board member Christopher Robbins of Familius. Christopher and Deltina will host Session 502: The Virtual Marketer: Optimizing Your Content for SEO on Friday, April 26 at 4:45pm.
Optimize for Universal Search
Today, getting found through search engines is much more than placing at the top of Google website search results. “Universal Search” is used to describe inclusion of items other that websites in search results. These include results for images, blog posts, books, products, videos, news, and more.
These “universal” results appear within traditional search result listings as “one boxes.” One boxes most often include shopping results, news, videos, and images.
 Shopping One Box in Search Results Diversify your online presence so your books get the best possible exposure in the relevant search databases. Start by optimizing your content for these “universal” search databases:
- Google Image: Optimize every image you put online using your best keywords relevant to the image.
- Google Books: Add your book to Google Play.
- Google Shopping: If you have a shopping cart on your website, add your product details to Google Merchant.
- Google Blogs: Post relevant and frequent blog entries, and guest post often.
- Google Video: Add your videos to YouTube and use your best keywords as tags and within uploaded video titles and descriptions.
- Google News: Publish news releases regularly using a reputable service such as PRWeb.
 News One Box and Google Authorship
Claim Your Google Authorship
The image above shows a guest post by this author on a popular social media blog. Note that the listing includes a profile image, Google Plus profile, and other information about the author. This listing enhancement is made possible using “Google Authorship.”
Google Authorship is a tactic you cannot afford to ignore – especially if you have your own blog, contribute online articles, or do any guest blogging. Google Authorship is a way for you to associate all of the articles and blog posts you author with your Google Plus account.
To establish Google Authorship on every post or article you author online:
Create your Google Plus profile.
- Place a link to your Google Plus profile, followed by the “rel=author” attribute.
- Place a link referencing the article or site in your Google Plus profile.
- Specific instructions can be found on the Google Authorship page
Help Your Book Listings Look Their Best With Google Rich Snippets
Microdata markup is a type of “semantic” markup that provides Google with information about your books that it uses to create “rich snippets.” Google rich snippets are a few additional lines of information under a search listing.
For books, rich snippets can include the book’s price, starred reviews, availability, and more. When you apply microdata markup to the information about your book on your website, your search result listings will look just like an Amazon book listing, and this can result in more click throughs.
 Google Rich Snippets For Books Google uses the Schema.org “vocabulary” for microdata markup, so the first step is to use the Schema.org vocabulary for books and add the relevant markup to the book content on your website. The site has good examples to guide you. There are also some nice tools like the microdata generator that can help you create the markup easily.
If you use WordPress to power your website, the following plugins can help you add microdata markup to your website content:
You can test your microdata markup using the Google Rich Snippets testing tool.
About the author: Deltina Hay is an IBPA board member and the author of three books on social media, the mobile web, and search optimization. Learn about her books and online courses at DeltinaU.
Connect with Deltina on Google Plus or on Twitter @deltina.
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