Book Worm Links

First of all, I know that book worm is normally spelled bookworm because I checked on Google. However, if I used bookworm in the title of this post, I'd never get any visitors because the term is too competitive. By spelling it book worm, I not only have a chance of drawing a few curious visitors, I also have a subject for a rainy Sunday afternoon post. You might wonder what's the point of using the less popular spelling of term, but it turns out that book worm is just as popular as pc repair on Google trends:



I like to use Google Trends as a sanity check on the Overture Keyword Selector when I'm looking at the popularity of common terms. But what does all this have to do with books and publishing on the Internet? Getting your books noticed on the Internet is a sort of a popularity contest, where you want your website to be popular, but you can't put all of your eggs in the wrong basket. For example, I'd been posting articles about self publishing online for five years before my website crept into the top 10 on Google for the term, but I reached number one for Slef Publishing as soon as I wrote about it:-)

Book worms, the real ones, eat holes in books, but just try finding any information on the subject online. There's so much more material about human book worms that it drowns out the invertebrates unless you start adding words like "paper" and "holes" to your query. Internet publishers have to be cognizant of these problems before titling their major pages and navigation links. As with the humble book worm, it doesn't pay for publishers to bite off more words than they can chew.

But it's not worth losing sleep over, because the truth of the matter is that you'll never attract worthwhile visitors through sophistry. If, in fact, if you are publishing books about treating paper to protect it from insect larvae, you don't want to attract a lot of visitors to your site who simply love books. Oops, that's probably the worst example I could have chosen, but hopefully you take my point. If you want to grow your website and your publishing business, you want to attract the visitors who will be happy that they found you.

In the new age of Internet publishing, it's true that content is king, but it's an incomplete truth. Without relevant, incoming links to your site, all the great content in the world can go unnoticed. Years ago, having great content was enough in itself, because the search engines were weighted towards guessing site relevancy based on word density and other natural language algorithms. Today, a new website has to struggle to emerge from the noise, just to get an opportunity to grow. It's like the ages old battle between the trees and the grasses, where the trees are the established publishers. It's just really tough for the grass to compete if it's always in the shade.

The only way I know of to jump through space and time and quickly establish you publishing site on the web is through a wormhole. In science fiction, a wormhole can serve as a physical link between remote parts of the universe, allowing publishers who had the foresight to equip themselves with the appropriate spacecraft to jump from the grasses to the trees in the blink of an eye. The only wormholes I'm aware of in the current Internet economy are to either spend a lot of money on promotion, or to acquire an existing publisher with a respectable website and adapt it to your business. And that's a subject I seem to be writing an awful lot about lately, despite the fact I've never done it myself. But I'm looking.