Each chapter of a webbook is a webpage. In many books, each chapter is a standalone essay that deserves its own recognition of value within the remainder of the book. For that reason, each chapter should have a compelling title that draws people into it in order to find out exactly what you’re writing about.
Titles
Go to the Copyblogger blog (http://www.copyblogger.com/blog) to learn about writing compelling titles or instead read books on copywriting (advertisement writing). And remember this: always include the full title of your chapter in your webpage title. Why? Because this is great promotion for the web. It will be picked up by the search engines as a cluster of primary keywords. And Google likes chapter titles to match webpage titles.
(The webpage title appears in the browser tab for users to see. You set the webpage title in the <head> with the <title></title> markup.)
If it doesn’t make sense to match a chapter title with its webpage title, at least make sure the webpage title contains appropriate keywords.
Let’s suppose you’re an attorney writing a book for laypeople on how to do your own divorce. You might have a chapter on:
Negotiating Your Divorce Settlement
How compelling is this title? It certainly lets a reader know what the chapter is about but is otherwise booooring. How about revising it to read:
Four Critical Issues to Negotiate in Your Divorce Settlement
This title not only gets you wondering what those four things are, but it seems to define the topic in terms that you can get your mind around. You only have to worry about four things. Under the prior title, you might have to worry about 24 things; who knows?
Another approach is create a question in the chapter title. People are curious. For instance, in a writing about food:
The Little-Known Health Benefits of Potato Skins
Here the words “Little-Known” create a mystery, in effect, and draw the user (reader) in.
There lots of effective copy writing techniques, but copy writing is beyond the scope of this book. There are many good books on copy writing, however, and you need to read one and keep it as a reference.
Headings
And while we’re talking about chapter titles, it makes sense to talk about chapter headings too. For the purposes of attracting readers and for the purposes of better SEO too, chapter headings for major sections in a chapter can be effective for making your book easier to read and more compelling. Headings work by drawing in people in from the internet. This is another opportunity for maximizing your SEO that you don’t want to pass up. In other words, headings should be keywords or include keywords.
A lot of work What I’ve suggested is a lot of work. But no one said marketing is easy. The key is to do your marketing as you write your book. Get accustomed to thinking about chapter titles, headings, and SEO. You will be able to form writing habits that make marketing more efficient and less burdensome.
HTML File Names
For SEO purposes the chapter title and the webpage title should match the HTML file name. Thus, the file for the chapter on negotiating a settlement should be:
FourCriticalIssuesToNegotiateInYourDivorceSettlement.html
Revisions
How does the topic of this chapter fit in with the chapter on revisions? If you’re like me, you have a lot of trouble writing good copy. Copywriting is an art, and those who do it full-time do it much better than the rest of us. But because you can revise a chapter at any time, you can get your webbook on the web first and then worry about copywriting later. That is, you can go through your webbook chapter by chapter later and revise each chapter by rewriting the content and headings according to good copywriting guidelines. I find this approach much more doable than trying to worry all the time about good copywriting while I’m writing a book.
Moreover, the search engines love changes in webpages, and this just gives you another reason to revise a webpage to achieve greater recognition from the search engines.
An about-face This section is an about-face from what I wrote earlier in this chapter: that one should wirite copy (advertising words, keywords) into the content as one writes. But starting out, this is a tough thing to do. Yet going back and adding copywriting gives you good practice. With such practice, you can start to incorporate your copywriting into your content writing as you write with the goal of eventually doing so efficiently with a minimum of effort.
Revision Problems
One thing to avoid is changing the name of the HTML file for the webpage. Although it is ideal SEO for the HTML file name to match the chapter title and webpage title, changing the file name will render all external hyperlinks to that webpage inoperable. This is highly undesirable. When you first publish your webbook, the chapter title and webpage title should match the HTML file name. Later, it’s a judgement call as to whether a chapter title change will improve SEO or diminish it.
If you do make a change, it’s always smart to preserve some of the keywords from the original chapter title. Note in the change above, some of the original keywords were preserved.
Negotiating Your Divorce Settlement
Four Critical Issues to Negotiate in Your Divorce Settlement
Thus, the keywords Your Divorce Settlement are preserved in the new chapter title and webpage title, and the HTML file name NegotiatingYourDivorceSetlement.com remains the same.
But keep in mind that even if you decide not to change the chapter title and webpage title, you can always change the chapter headings for improved SEO.
