Amazon.com, the world’s largest bookstore, has more than 14 million titles listed on the site. While it’s easy to direct customers to your book’s Amazon sales page through your own promotional efforts, it’s more of a challenge to get found by shoppers who are already on the Amazon site.
Customers often search for books (especially nonfiction titles) using the keyword search feature on Amazon. To perform a keyword search, select “Books” from the drop-down menu near the top of the home page, then enter keywords in the search box to the right. From the next screen, you can click on the “Advanced Search” button to perform a more specific search.
How to get results
Keyword searches bring up results based on availability, popularity (number of books already sold on the site), and relevance to the keywords being searched. Amazon’s search engine looks for keyword matches in the title/subtitle and tag fields. If you haven’t yet published your nonfiction book, try to use important keywords in the title and/or subtitle.
Tags are keywords that customers have associated with products to help them and other shoppers find items related to that keyword. To add tags for your book or Kindle ebook, scroll down your book page on Amazon to find the “Tags Customers Associate with this Product” section, then click on the small “Tag this Product” button to open a pop-up window where you can add tags. Click the “Save Tags” button when you are finished adding your tags.
What really matters
Word order matters, so create different search tags with variations on your most important keywords. You can add up to 15 tags per product. If you’re publishing in Kindle format, there’s also a place on the Kindle publishing dashboard to enter important keywords and select appropriate book categories as you are publishing the ebook.
Keyword searches can be a valuable source of traffic on Amazon.com, so be sure to tag your book with keywords that your target customers are likely to use in their searches.
Excerpted from How to Sell More Books on Amazon,  by book marketing coach Dana Lynn Smith. This ebook, available in both PDF and Kindle format, outlines strategies for boosting visibility on Amazon.com, increasing sales, and improving profits. For more book marketing tips, follow @BookMarketer on Twitter and get Dana’s free Top Book Marketing Tips ebook at www.TheSavvyBookMarketer.com
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