As little authority as this domain (searchclarity.com) currently has, last night’s blog post Will it Rank? Floating a new site for “SEO for Book Publishers” has floated up to the third domain listed (fifth URL) (my Google preferences are set to view 100 listings, so frequently I’ll see an expanded list with clustered URLs from the same domain more frequently than when the preferences are set to only 10 results.)

And that was quick; only 15 hours later:

Remember, the goal here isn’t to rank SearchClarity.com, but rather to float what I’m going to refer to as the official SEO for Book Publishers domain up to the top spot for it’s namesake “branded” query. The supposition is that by using a keyword-link magnet domain (a domain that will influence how the linkerati will link to a URL), we’ll have the best shot possible at outranking any other URL that comes along for the query seo for book publishers. Will a keyword-link magnet domain alone make the difference? Over the long term, most likely not; it’ll need the support of the collective intelligence that Google harnesses to determine relevancy. And today, more than anything, that means high quality links.

But the fact that SearchClarity.com had a post that showed up so quickly, and so high in the results for this term, underscores a few realities about this particular SERP, perhaps most notably that there are just not that many indexed pages that contain this exact text string. In fact, there are approximately 28 known URLs that Google reports here:

Compare that to a non-exact match for the same phrase, without the use of quotation marks, and you get an exponentially larger number: 140,000 document

The more specific a query, the fewer documents that Google will find relevant, and typically, that translates into less competition. So if “all other things” were equal, then this formula should bear out:

fewer documents = fewer competitors = easier to get ranked

However, all things are never equal, are they? What if there are 30 URLs that have been given far more authority to rank than any other URL in the index for those terms? That would be harder to break into. Try getting ranked for “buy viagra”. Not impossible, but that’s, well… harder. And that leads to another corresponding formula:

more trusted authority documents = more competition = harder to get ranked = expensive and time consuming

Following this line of thought, getting ranked for the exact match phrase “seo for book publishers” should be a snap compared to the broad match version of the same phrase. But both will be considerably easier to rank for than what is arguably a branded query such as “seo book”, or a category phrase such as “book publishers”. While a rank for either of these might be a feather in our cap, that’s hardly our goal. We just want to get a new domain ranked for the name of it’s namesake term, which is also the same name as the TOC Tutorial session, and the companion DVD Tutorial to be released this month: SEO for Book Publishers.

And now, with one more blog post added to the arsenal, we have added another relevant blog post for our target query, complete with a couple of links. And the game continues…

Bookmark It!:

Almost on a whim, yesterday I launched a WordPress blog entitled SEO for Book Publishers: Beyond Book Search. (See? There’s the link.)

Right now, there’s just one post on the site, and it may just stay that way; I wanted to give a home to the DVD tutorial that O’Reilly is publishing next month (it’s available for pre-order, and should be release sometime this month.) The DVD is a three hour recording of last month’s tutorial at O’Reilly’s TOC 2008 Conference: Tools of Change for Publishing. During the session, we spent three hours going over how publishers can follow a “Best Practices” approach to search engine optimization, how to “think about search” as a medium for communication, and how to leverage their strengths as warehouses of authoritative content. The opportunities aren’t always immediately apparent; but if you know where to look, you start to feel a bit like Bilbo Baggins must have felt when he found a mountain of fortunes underneath a giant sleeping dragon. What to do, what to do….

I’ll write more on this topic later; but for now I’m keeping the new site simple, and taking advantage of watching what happens (from an SEO perspective) when a new site is launched.

The first question is: what will it take to rank this new site in Google for the exact title of the product: [seo for book publishers]?

Here’s what we’re looking at today on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008:

The answer to that question may not be immediately apparent to the casual searcher, but most seasoned SEO’s will probably be able to get a sense of how big that dragon is pretty quickly. It’s up against some pretty stiff competition; even O’Reilly.com isn’t consistently showing up tops for the official catalog product page yet, which has been SEO’d by virtue of the template used to create the catalog pages, along with the internal link structures on the oreilly.com domain. It was ranked in the top spot last week, but has now dropped down to number 2. This isn’t the first time this has happened; in fact, O’Reilly has had several pages ranked tops over the past couple of months, if only briefly (if you dig down into the results, you’ll see two other TOC URLs for previous tutorial sessions by the same title.) Each of these URLs, even with the authority passed down from O’Reilly.com, just didn’t have the staying power to stay up there.

What’s even more interesting is which site is beating them out: Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com (one of my personal favorite’s in the SEO blogosphere) currently outranks the official product page on O’Reilly with a thought provoking post entitled Death of the Book: Publishers Will Become Interactive Media Artists.

It doesn’t take an extensive audit to figure out why this single blog post is still up here while the rest of the TOC pages are sinking down to join the other “syndicated” sites down below; while there are many variables outside of the typical on-page/off-page spectrum that determines which page is showing tops at any given moment (recency of indexing, linking patterns, canonicalization of URLs, etc), by and large, this post is benefiting from a strong mixture of inbound links for “seo”, “book” and “publishers”. This page has been around for awhile, and was ranked for “seo for book publishers” before the idea for the session was born over a year ago. Great content featured on an authority site alone might do the trick; just take a good look at his domain, the URL, the blog post and content. Combine that with a squeeze of inbound link juice from other folks in the blogosphere and otherwise, and you’ve got yourself a contender.

So can we outrank Aaron for the title of a DVD Tutorial for it’s own title? Shouldn’t we be able to do that? And what’s the most absolute bare minimum that we need to do to even get into the game? (A more important question might be why bother? This query isn’t likely to generate more a tremendous amount of volume. But I’ll save those musings for another time.)

Rather than diving too deeply into the Ranking Matrix to figure out exactly what we’d need to do, we’re going to keep things simple: register a domain that reflects what the “official” title site should look like, build it out as a resource on the topic over time, do some lightweight on-page SEO for “seo for book publishers”, add a few links and an XML sitemap, and start telling folks about it. While this strategy is still extremely “white hat”, and uses a pretty straight foward approach to a ground-up SEO campaign, it’s a brand-spanking new site, with no links (until this post came along.) Given all that, how hard will it be to float this? Will it rank? And if so, where will it rank? Will it beat out O’Reilly? Will it beat out Aaron Wall’s singularly notable blog post?

We’re going to find out.

Here’s what we’ve started with:

On Tuesday, March 4th, 2008:

• Domain registered: seoforbookpublishers.com;
• DNS pointed to hosting account;
• Wordpress blog launched;
• Standard Very Plain Text theme added;
• One post written;
• A couple of images and links posted to the site;
• Minimal amount of SEO done to the site, most of it automagically with the WordPress install (title tag, links, etc);

Wednesday, March 5th, 2008:

• A few more edits to the copy;
• Added Google Sitemaps (used a WordPress plugin)
• Added Google Analytics;
• Verfied the site through Google Webmaster Central;
• Submitted sitemap through GWC;
• Send out a couple of emails to friends and colleagues;
• Linked to SEO for Book Publishers on this blog (hey look, I did it again!)

I’m calling it a day on this project, it’s a decent start. Beside, I’ve got other things to do… more updates to be posted as I deem it important enough to bother.

Bookmark It!:

(Update: by Wednesday, a third URL was indexed: enter the main searchclarity.com domain, which effectively replaced the SearchClarity.com Launch Notes post as the most relevant listing on this domain.)

Less than one week after launching searchclarity.com, without adding a single hypertext link from an external site, a single blog post has popped up in the Google SERP for “search clarity”:

Poking around using a few different forensic searches, we found some typical variations:

• For variations on exact match queries (the launch blog post ranks top for “search clarity” vs. search clarity, where the blog post appears at #3),
• For site: searches with and without the “www” (canonical hostname issues have not yet been resolved on the site, and the site:searchclarity.com search shows a second listing for the contact page, where site:www.searchclarity.com only shows the single blog post.)

We haven’t reached our goal yet of grabbing top ranking for the “search clarity” query w/o quotation marks; but the most interesting thing to note is that it was indexed and ranked at all. There are no external links pointing to this domain, and very few signals to identify this site as worth getting listed in the first place. I frequently point out to clients that submitting a brand new site or page to search engines isn’t necessary; in fact, without the benefit of an inbound link from a trusted site, even submitting won’t be of any help anymore. But typically, a site that is built on a solid foundation of SEO best practices, and even just some light online promotion and link building, will usually be enough to get brand new site listed, and even ranked for a non-competitive query phrase. But this time, we’re looking at a site that got indexed and ranked, without a single inbound link. So what gives?

Sorry, more on that later; I’m off on vacation for the next week. Off to float down the Rogue River in Oregon.

Want to watch the results with me?
If you’ve stumbled onto this site and want to be kept abreast of watching a new site’s evolution, just subscribe to the watch-list using the contact form here. (Just thought of this, so haven’t had time to create a specific form for this yet. Just leave a note that you want to keep abreast of how this domain is doing in the engines, or leave a comment below. I’ll dive back into this when I get back home in a week.)

Bookmark It!:

- Submitted http://www.searchclarity.com/sitemap.xml (Google Sitemap file) to Google Webmaster Central (using the WordPress Google Sitemaps plug-in)
- Added Google Webmaster Central authorization file
- Added Yahoo! Site Explorer verification file
- Installed Yahoo Site Explorer Badge
- Installed & Activated Google Analytics Account, using Ultimate Google Anlaytics for WordPress
- Switched to SandBox Theme to view activated Widgets

07/10/07
- Sammy installed Wordpress 2.2.1 in the root directory for SearchClarity.com;
- Sammy installed the long-overdue SEO Title Tag plug-in for Wordpress (thank you Stephen!);

Bookmark It!:

Over the next 30 days as our schedule allows, we’re going to slowly piece this WordPress site together, adding links slowly as we go, evolving the design and functionality, and tracking the results in each of the major search engines.

As of today’s date:

• this site has no backlinks.
• It’s not indexed, or cached.
• It has no presence in search engines, anywhere.
• The SERPs for “search clarity” are extremely different in Yahoo! and Google web search. (And this site is nowhere to be found.)

Bookmark It!: