Tagging- The Basics

. This is a great feature of Amazon and it is entirely user powered. Before going further, just look at the image below to see what tags are:

Basically, tags are user defined keywords for a book. When entering key words, sometimes an autofill menu pops up underneath. Amazon has numerous keywords that it will recommend, with a number next to it. The higher the number, the more popular the tag (and also the more competition for a top rank with that tag). If you look at the image above, each tag has a check box next to it and a number on the other side. The check boxes are for whether or not the user agrees with the tag and the number in parenthesis is the number of people who agreed with it.

Here’s where this comes into use. The more times a tag is voted on, the higher ranking the book has for said tag. Various communities are tied to the tags and there are individual rankings within. When people click on a tag to see the rankings, it would be a great idea for yours to be in the top. This is not difficult to do. We will help you but you can also help yourself. Here’s how:

1.       If you have only a few or no tags, you can add any that you want. Don’t go above 15 as the system limits each user to 15 tags (or votes) per item.

2.       You’re better off having about a dozen key words that you focus on than to spread your attention to numerous ones. Also, I would recommend only using one or two of the most popular tags.  This way you can use a bunch of other keywords that may be used a bit less but have significantly less competition. This is similar to keyword tailing in SEO. If you become the top dog in several lesser used tags, you’ll probably do better than if you try to get votes for the top performing keywords (which can have hundreds of votes when you’re talking about wildly popular books like Twilight or The Girl Who Kicked Over the Hornet’s Nest).

3.       Once you have the tags that you want, send an email to your family and friends. Have them go and vote on the tags. They need to have an active Amazon account to do this.

This one more method amongst a series of methods to garner as much attention to your book’s Amazon page as possible. Not only do we want it to come up in organic searches, but we want it to be maximized when other marketing methods start bringing traffic in.