Latest article "Are Your Characters Haunted?" is a guest post on Southern Writers Magazine's blog!

My article "Are Your Characters Haunted?" is a guest blog article on Southern Writers Magazine's Suite T blog http://southernwritersmagazine.blogspot.com/2013/11/are-your-characters-haunted.html …

What is SEO? And can SEO help your ebook sales?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a group of marketing and technical techniques used to bring Internet taffic to your web page or blog.  Websites are ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users.  So the first page of search results are the most relevant to the search word or phrase that you typed in Google.  Basically, the whole idea of SEO is to get on those first two pages of search results.  Most people never go past those first two pages.  The way to get your site noticed?  There are so many.  I'm only going to give a very brief overview of the concept in this blog article and expand in more detail in later posts. 
SEO can improve your site's exposure by the strategic use of keywords or key phrases.  These are the words people search for in their Google searches.  They could also use Yahoo or Bing, but for the sake of brevity I'm just saying Google. 
Keywords can be sprinkled throughout your web content, but don't overdo this.  Keyword "stuffing" will get your site flagged and plus it just reads badly; not to mention it looks unprofessional.  You want to shoot for 5 percent (5%) keyword saturation throughout your copy, nothing more.  Keywords can also be placed in metadata such as HTML tags.  More on this in a future blog posting.
Are you noticing through tracking that your visitors are leaving your website quickly?  They aren't hanging around to read?  That's called a "bounce" visit.  You don't want that.  If this happens to you, then you really need to examine the quality of your web content.  People want to learn something from articles they read; not shallow, thin "fluff" pieces that waste their time.
I'll give more details later about how to control your "bounce" factor in your copy.  SEO covers such a wide range of information.  Treating it all in one blog post would be impossible.
The bounce factor leads to another major factor that draws search engine bots to crawl your site as well as visitors--Quality Content.  Without this your website or blog is merely a fluff site where visitors leave feeling deceived and cheated.  Time is valuable to everyone and time is money for many, so don't waste your readers' time.
Links are important in driving traffic to your site.  Make friends with other bloggers who blog within your field of interest.  This is a way to get backlinks which help improve your rankings.

The Price is Right! Choosing the right price for your e-book

Here's the deal on pricing your e-book for Amazon Kindle:  If you price your book below $2.99, you will not receive the 70 percent royalty on sales; you'll only receive 35 percent.
But while I'd like to charge $2.99 a copy, I've got to admit nobody knows me or my writing yet.  So I feel a little pretentious starting out so high at $2.99.  But maybe that will be a good experiment to conduct before I upload my book to Amazon Kindle Select.  I'll let you know when that happens.  In the meantime, I'm working on a new mystery novel.  It's one I've been working on for some time.  I'm finally coming into the home stretch on it, and I'm shooting for April as my due date. 
In the meantime, I'd love to hear your thoughts on what you think about pricing e-books.  What do you charge?  Is that price level working for you?