Search Clarity

I’m testing something new today, and thought I’d keep track of it here… because, mostly, I just wanted to give myself a link. I mean, nobody really reads this thing yet, right? Anywho…

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.

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