Where are buyers going to find new books these days? I hope bookstores will always be around, but I think it’s unlikely. They appear to be going the way of the soda fountain. Are Walmart and McDonald’s improvements on the old five and dimes with their soda counters? It doesn’t really matter. Walmart is here and the drugstore/soda shop isn’t.

Borders and Barnes & Noble tromped over the independent book stores and Amazon, in turn, sucked a whole lot of life out of those two, until Borders died and God only knows how long Barnes & Noble will be around.

This is how it goes. Who uses the yellow pages anymore? Anyone? It’s much quicker to Google things and pull up maps and reviews along with the phone numbers.

So if I manage to publish a book and someone knows the title and Googles it, they’ll find it. But what if they browse teen/fantasy/romance? Will my little book come up in search engines if those terms are entered? Not if I had a book published today, it wouldn’t. So what if I had a blog that talked a lot about teen/fantasy/romance and what if I linked to other blogs about that topic and they linked back to me?

It’s probably not too early for me to start thinking about this stuff. (Hope springs eternal!)

In Monday’s comments section, Selina said that my search for a way to share link love was contrived. I agreed, but I said we could call it intentional as easily as we called it contrived. Whatever we call it, is laboring over search engine placement worth the time and effort?

Selina is right when she says the way to build your authority is to gain quality backlinks via posting quality content. And I should make clear that I’m not advocating doing shady link exchanges or trying to get backlinks that have nothing to do with your topic of interest. I’m not saying we should scour the internet looking of dofollow site lists so we can leave comments. I’m simply thinking that while I’ve been free to play around with the blog over the years, there comes a time when blogging becomes part of the job. And when something is a job, you do the first several things—thoughtful content, commenting on other sites, joining with others with similar interests—but you also do the fourth, fifth, and sixth things. So I mean to consider those first things and to work on focusing content and spending time community-building so as to improve rankings, but I also plan to give consideration to ease of navigation and aesthetics, and also to search terms and search engine placement, and yes, backlinks and internal links and link juice.

Word of mouth is the best tool for selling, but think about how many Google queries are entered each day? Apparently those people are looking for something their friends have no opinion on, or they are searching for info that goes beyond what their friends have told them. When they are searching for the product you are selling—book reviews, or chit chat about children’s books, or children’s books about ancient Greece and Egypt or Star Wars—does your site come up on the front page of the search engines? If not, does that mean you have lousy content? Maybe it just means that you need to work on getting word about your great site out to the world.

I’m going to be looking at this for myself over the coming months, and I’ll probably post about it.

What about the rest of you? When you put in keywords are you coming up on the first page, or the first ten pages, even? Which search terms brought your blog up on the first page?

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