Whether you plan to put your self-published a course in miracles up for sale on your own website or on a popular book-selling platform like Kindle or Kobo, one of the most important things you can do is boost the visibility, also known as the discoverability, of your books online.

While there’s no way to optimize your actual book for search engines, you can optimize the pages that your books are posted on and the links that point to those pages in order to funnel more prospective buyers and increase their exposure.

Before we get into specifics, think about this simple truth…

The Way We Discover Books Has Changed Forever

Imagine walking into a book store and browsing for a book on a specific topic.

You’ll most likely walk to the section of the store that has the type of book you are looking for. For example a cook book, a science book or a literature book.

From there you would peruse the book shelf until you come across a topic that most closely matches the information you’re looking for. It may be a cook book about baking cakes, a science book about geology or a literature book based on space age science fiction.

For all of your time and effort, you would most likely end up with a book that closely meets your needs.

Now come back to reality for a moment and think about the way you would use the internet to conduct the same kind of book search.

Without an actual title already in mind, it is often very difficult to hone in on the perfect book that falls in line with the information you want.

On the other hand, if you learn and use the language of the internet and combine it with the way that the average internet user searches for information, you can position every book that you release prominently in front of an audience that is most likely to be interested in its content.

This language is known as Search Engine Optimization.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the practice of altering a website or single web page so that it is naturally more visible in a search engine’s results. These non-paid-for positions in the search engine are also known as ‘organic’ search results.

The goal of every Search Engine Optimization endeavor should be to get the pages that list your books and their buy links to appear as high up in the search engines as possible for certain keywords and phrases.