This is an older blog post from my time at Lulu, but I’ve noticed that many of today’s authors are still unaware of little things that can vastly increase their book’s online visibility. So it’s worth an updated look.

Many Lulu authors have noticed how well their Lulu books rank on the search engine Google.com, so I thought I’d pass along some useful tips on how you can obtain these same results as well. Some of these rankings come from Lulu’s behind-the-scenes engineering efforts, but most of it comes down to how Lulu simply lists your book title. Google does the rest, and many authors have found the results to be truly amazing. If you do nothing else to promote your book, just do this. Anyway, it’s easy and free!

Search Engines- Free Publicity:

Outside of winning the lottery or otherwise making the news, one of the best free promotional tools you will find for your book is high search engine placement. Needless to say, it helps potential buyers find you and your book in the rapidly growing online world. And authors–especially new authors–need all the help they can get when it comes to being noticed online.  From the experiment below it seems that Lulu, for one, focuses pretty heavily on making sure authors get high rankings in search engine responses.

Want some examples?

Search on google.com for Lulu authors or books. Go to Google and type in “George Farrier” (Too busy? I’ve done it for you ) or ” Power Wagons In The Desert” (see results). Do the same with  ”Random Acts Of Nonsense”  by Jason Tanamor (see results). Just pick any book and you’ll see what I mean- their Lulu book or storefront is at or near the top of the search output.

Now think–that could be your book that 10,000 people are finding by simply typing your name or book in an online search engine. All without you lifting a finger.

So how did this happen? How did these books make it to the top of Google, the most popular search engine in the world? Well, search engines do something called a “deep crawl” of web sites fairly often. This is a fascinating process that indexes and weighs the importance, or “page rank,” of every page on the web. More importantly, one of the phrases that gets indexed are words in the “title” tag–some HTML which exists on mostly all web pages. You would never notice otherwise, but when you publish your book on Lulu, Lulu will put the title of your book and your author name in the “title” tag. 

Not all self publishing or retail sites do this, so you should find out before you publish whether or not they list your book this way. I’ve seen that other publishing or retail sites list their own name before the title and author names, which is not good. For example, try searching for “Richard Bushong” in Google. Mr. Bushong has his book available at Lulu and also at Amazon. The simple fact is that his Lulu links come up first in Google. 

Book title, author name, and the right online publisher/retailer. It’s a three-pronged approach that can work to your advantage.

I’ve not been as close to how the other online publishers–Blurb, CreateSpace, and Wordclay–work with the search engines in optimizing the ranking of your book for general google searches. If you know, please comment or email me at hhutton@publishandsell.com

Till next time,

Henry