Self Published Authors

I was reading through the latest issue of ReadWriteWeb when I came across an article about making sure Google and similar search engines can find your book reviews online.

It's a very brief article that hits the nail on the head -- search engines don't just depend on keywords, they need context specific tags.

"The right way of marking up content so that it can be understood by Google, other search engines and semantic technologies is by using a structured format such as ePub, hReview Microformat, abmeta or one of the other structured formats. Using a structured format removes the ambiguity and enables computer to 'know' what the review is about."

While this is an excellent article, you must keep in mind that it only helps those with access to the raw HTML of the book reviews you are posting. If you roll your own reviews, posting HTML online yourself, good on you. Follow the tips above and SEO is acheived. If you are like most everyone else and you use a blogging platform, you can do the above also if you aren't squeamish about hacking around templates or even a little code.

You're pretty much out of luck though if you use a hosted solution, like Blogger, TypePad, WordPress.com, etc., or write for an organization, like say The L.A. Times, as the article uses as an example. In those cases, let your editors and webmasters know you'd like to have targeted meta tags for your posts that will help your writing reach a larger audience.