Publishing Your Own Book? Get a Website Now!

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By Michael Quarles

If you've decided to publish your own book there's one thing you better do, and you have to do it right now: get a website. I'm sure you want to promote your book on the web, but what you may not realize is the time it takes to build traffic for your site. If the web will be your biggest promotional tool, you'll have to get your site up and drawing hits before you publish, unless you want your sales to languish through the months it may take to develop a significant number of visitors.

For the first time publisher-web developer, it may seem a relatively simple course of action. You build your website, register it with search engines and directories, then when someone does a search on Google or MSN your site pops up as one of the options.

Essentially, that is the way it works. What isn't factored in is the time it will take the search engine's web bot, or "spider" as it is commonly called, to find your site and crawl it. The key to reducing this amount of time is to have links to your site on other people's sites. The spider can then follow these strands of the web back to you.

The most common means of getting these links are to swap them with other websites. This reciprocal linking isn't quite as good as a one way link, of the sort you can acquire by writing articles (like this one), and getting your website registered with every decent directory you can find. Of course, it does happen that another site will give you a link because your content would be of interest to their readers.

Even with a good number of links to your site, you may still rank low in the search results. The best remedy for this is to write keyword rich pages about your subject that inform the reader. Quality will rise to the top, particularly if your search term is featured throughout the page.

Michael Quarles is the author of "Building a PC for Beginners". His website is http://www.monkeyseemonkeydobooks.com/

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