How to Use Keywords in Online Rare Book Listings

"I’m Molly Mackey with Expert Village. Now we’re going to talk about the importance of keywords in your listing. After we’ve done a basic description one of the most overlooked things that most book dealers do are put down very simplistic keywords, well that doesn’t really attract the attention of the sale. You want to put in as many as possible and most databases will allow you unlimited keywords so why not take advantage of that. If a customer is searching for a book, they’re going to want to find something, they’re not going to type in literature, they are going to type in obscure words. So for instance the book that we just described in the previous clip has many keywords that we could use. Most book dealers might just put crafts or folk art, those are fine you definitely want to mention those but there’s a lot of other things that you could do. A customer might perhaps be searching for embroidery, they might perhaps be searching for blue jeans, they might be searching for macramé, take advantage of every possible thing you can in a book, I would put 1960’s art, I would put 1970’s art, I would think of as many possible things as I could. That helps bring people to find your book. Another example would be this book here. Most people would probably just list this under spirituality or psychotherapy, there’s very interesting content in this book that might be overlooked and that someone might be actually searching for so I always tend to browse the contents pages and look for interesting topics. For example we have a chapter on Cosmology, so you could mention that, we also have subtle energy, we have god realization, many topics also this particular book has a forward by Elizabeth Cooper Ross and she’s pretty, fairly well known. If you’ve recognized somebody, you know and even if it’s a forward or an introduction use their name, put it in the keywords, you want to put as many as possible."