Untangling SEO

 This is what Google Gemini 2.5 Pro thinks authors should know about SEO

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization): This is the practice of improving a website to increase its visibility when people search for products or services related to your business in Google, Bing, and other search engines. For an author, this means making your website or book listings more likely to appear when someone searches for your name, book title, or related topics.

• Keywords: These are the words and phrases that people type into search engines. For an author, these could be your name, book titles, genres, or topics you write about.

• Metadata: This is data that provides information about other data. In SEO, it often refers to the title and description of a webpage that appears in search engine results. This information helps search engines and potential readers understand what your page is about.

• SERP (Search Engine Results Page): This is the page that a search engine returns after a user submits a search query. Most people don't look beyond the first page of results.

• Backlinks: These are links from other websites to your website. They are important for SEO because they act as a vote of confidence from one site to another.

• CTR (Click-Through Rate): This is the ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who view a page, email, or advertisement. It is commonly used to measure the success of an online advertising campaign.

• Schema: This is a type of microdata that, once added to a webpage, creates an enhanced description (commonly known as a rich snippet), which appears in search results.

• Bounce Rate: This is the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.

• Domain Authority: This is a search engine ranking score that predicts how likely a website is to rank on search engine result pages (SERPs).

• Algorithm Update: Search engines like Google frequently update their algorithms to provide better search results. These updates can affect how websites are ranked.

• Personas: In this context, these are fictional representations of your ideal readers. Understanding your reader personas can help you create content and use keywords that will appeal to them.

Authors — do you know about Emotional Marketing Value?

What is Emotional Marketing Value (EMV)?

Communication is the key of effective marketing. And the key to communication is being able to reach the reader at an emotional level. Involving them in your words and invoking their deeper thoughts.

While many authors 'guess' how people will react to their words,  researchers have determined a test which  gives an actual rating that can be used to judge how well received your copy will be to others.

Effectively, by using emotional words in your titles, subtitles and book description your book will have greater impact and you'll get more sales.

So how do I do this?

Here's the first draft of the cover of a book I worked on for some time back in 2016. Let's see how it can be improved:

There are four key areas of text here where EMV can have a dramatic effect:

1. The title and subtitle
2. The first line of the description on the back cover - 'Author John Chapman shows what is involved in getting your book published.'
3. The phrase '…the choice is yours and it's not as difficult as you might think.'
4. The section 'Getting sales is not quite so simple though. John walks you through editing, cover design, book descriptions and book promotion.'

First we need to measure the impact of these areas

There are two free online tools for this. I find that titles and headlines are best measured with the CoSchedule headline analyzer tool at https://coschedule.com/headline-analyzer. Entering the text of the heading and subheading there gives a score of 64. Not perfect but what I wanted here was a big impact made by the first three words and last three words. As CoSchedule point out—that's what people tend to see first.

The description text on the back cover is best analysed for it's EMV using the free tool provided by The Advanced Marketing Institute at https://www.aminstitute.com/headline/

This tool handles a maximum of 20 words at a time so the three sections of text were entered one at a time using 'media and communications' as the type.

'Author John Chapman shows what is involved in getting your book published.' got an EMV of 16.67%

'the choice is yours and it's not as difficult as you might think' got an EMV of 15.38%

'Getting sales is not quite so simple though. John walks you through editing, cover design, book descriptions and book promotion.' got an EMV of 20%

Considering that average language has an EMV of 20% these are not good scores.

The results of tweaking the words

Phrase	EMV %
the choice is yours and it's not as difficult as you might think	15.38
the choices are yours and it's not as difficult as you might think	23.08
the choices are yours and it's not as difficult as you might believe	30.77
the choices are yours, and it's not as tricky as you might believe	38.46
the choices are up to you, and it's not as tricky as you may believe	46.67
the choices are up to you and are not as tricky as you may believe	53.33

According to the Advanced Marketing Institute most professional copywriters' headlines will have 30%-40% EMV Words in their text, while the most gifted copywriters will have 50%-75% EMV words. I'm happy with a score of 53.33%
In the same way I tweaked the other phrases and ended up with:

Author John Chapman leads you through the intricacies of getting your book to readers. - (EMV 50%)
      • Conventional publishing
      • Independent - Print on demand
      • Ebooks
…the choices are up to you, and are not as tricky as you may believe. - (EMV 53.33%)

John directs you through cover design, book descriptions, keywords and book promotion because, unfortunately, getting sales is not so obvious. - (EMV 55%)

As you can see changing a few words has left the meaning the same but the impact is far greater. A few minutes exploring these tools and your book descriptions can have a dramatic effect.

…and the book?

It was published on 20th December 2017; today in 2025 it's already out of date. Things change rapidly in the publishing world so I've moved the updated content to a website (https://publishingguide.uk), making it available FREE. You can still find the original book at most retailers if you wish. Use this link to find it at the retailer you prefer  https://books2read.com/guide2publish If you sign up to my email list and mention 'Illustrated Guide' in the comment area, I'll let you know when any changes are available. That's at http://bit.ly/avilist

The book cover layout?

That's a different subject and quite involved. I dealt with it at https://publishingguide.uk/book_covers.html

If this post has helped you find free ebooks will you help us? Download a FREE copy of our books 'Immortality Gene' from http://smarturl.it/avi or/and Raging Storm http://smarturl.it/botr Even if you never read them (but we hope you will) - it will help our rankings.