Among the best ways to crank up book sales is to get your title or name as an author at the top of the search engine list. That is, if you write car maintenance guidebooks when someone Googles “car maintenance guidebooks” and your website appear in the first couple of listings – or at least in the top 10 (usually the first page of returned searches) – you’ve greatly improved your visibility and hence increased your chances of a book sale. A good way to boost your ranking on search engines is through backlinks.

Backlinks are links on other websites that send people to your website or blog. The more backlinks the better. In addition, the higher the listing of a website when an Internet search is conducted, the more valuable that backlink is in boosting your site’s ranking.

There are plenty ways to get backlinks. You might guest blog at another site. You might ask bloggers who write about topics related to your book to include a link. You might use social media such as Goodreads, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. You might be the subject of a newspaper article that appears online. In short, every effort you make to boost awareness of your book ought to include a link that brings readers back to your website’s home page and hence improves its visibility.

Be aware that obtaining backlinks must be a sustained effort in your marketing. The older the article or blog post or tweet, the less likely it is to be seen, and hence the value of that backlink falls off. If you succeed in raising your website’s visibility this month with backlinks, two months from now your site’s ranking inevitably will decline – unless you find new places to include backlinks.

One last tip: Be careful of scams promising to bring “millions of viewers to your websites” by taking care of the backlinks for you. Often those companies place those backlinks on very low quality websites that no one ever views and that actually can hurt your ranking in the search engine algorithms.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past decade, I’ve helped more than 300 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the 7 Minutes a Day… writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.