Selecting Your Book’s Keywords

In this message, we’ll show you a simple method to determine the keywords that are most likely to get your Kindle book into the hands of readers.

Kindle allows up to seven keywords for your book. We suggest using all of them and we advise spending a little time determining which keywords are best for your book. When a buyer searches for a book on Amazon, the website’s search engine will suggest a variety of books based on the words used in the search.  The books suggested are based on relevance to the search terms unless the buyer selects a different setting, such as the highest average rating.

Once a buyer begins typing in the search box, Amazon will suggest words that are commonly used together as search terms. These groups of words appear below the search window in a drop-down menu. If the buyer chooses one of the suggested combinations of words — the search engine displays books that are relevant to that group of words. If they do not, the search engine suggests a group of books relevant to the words the buyer entered.

The words that appear in groups when a user begins typing are the most commonly searched-for combinations. If you want to know what the majority of people are searching for – just look at the combinations of words that are displayed in the drop-down menu as you type. This is where smart authors get their keywords from.

The keywords an author chooses for their book are used by Amazon’s search engines to match up searches by buyers to the books they’re looking for. If you can determine which search words a buyer might use when they’re looking for a book like yours, you’ll know what words to use as your keywords. If you have those same words as your book’s keywords, you have a much better chance of having Amazon suggest your book to a potential buyer.

Keywords can be single words or they may contain strings of words such as “prophetic ministry”, “prayer and fasting” or  “signs and wonders.” In the three examples shown below, when we searched for possible keywords for the book Divine Healing Made Simple, we found that these were groups of words that were relevant to the book and commonly searched fhttps://web.archive.org/web/20200808154834/http:/bit.ly/Divine_HealingMadeSimpleor together, so we used them as Keywords. By using this process, we came up with seven different combinations of keywords for the book. Note: in the last example, “prophetic dreams” also came up as a commonly searched-for combination. We could have used this combination as another keyword.

To choose the keywords for your book, think about the word combinations that are relevant to your genre or the topics discussed in your book and try typing different combinations into the search box, looking for combinations that work. When you have seven sets of words that you think will work well, enter them in the keyword box for your book on the KDP dashboard and save your selections.

 

 

 

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