Every time I talk to somebody about running a publishing business that gets the majority of its customers from this website, the discussion invariably comes around to SEO - Search Engine Optimization. I don't bring it there myself because I don't believe in SEO in the traditional sense. I do believe in making it as easy as possible for a search engine to index and "understand" my web pages, which is why I began implementing the new canonical link element today. Unfortunately, my website includes a mix of link types in the navigation, both absolute (http://www.fonerbooks.com/cornered.htm) and relative (cornered.htm) due to my stubborn refusal to give up my HTML editor from 1995 which won't let me navigate a local version of the site on my own hard drive if I use absolute links. Hopefully, the new canonical link element will make sure the search engines fully credit all of the links to a page in their ranking algorithms.
But most of the money and effort that publishing companies spend on SEO is wasted for one simple reason - they don't publish any content that can benefit from best practices. At best, SEO can make it clear to the search engines what you or your SEO company wants the search engine to think the page is about. Of course, a lot of people with websites try lying to the search engines about the true content of their pages because they don't think they would get enough visitors otherwise. But search engine engineers are pretty smart, so trying to tell them lies isn't very useful, except for out on the long tail where there aren't any competing pages for a specific phrase. For example, if you bought the domain name whyismorrisrosenthalsuchajerk.com and posted an essay titled "Why is Morris Rosenthal such a jerk?", no doubt you could get the #1 placement in the search engines for the phrase. But good luck earning a living with a site like that, or with a million more like it.
The reason most publishing companies don't publish any meaningful content is that they still don't understand the web. They basically see it as an extension of glossy magazine ads or as a replacement for the NYT Sunday Book Review, and they vacillate between hoping that the Google Books program will either save their bacon or just go away. The one thing they absolutely won't do is adopt any of their premium content to the web, arranging it in an logical architecture that puts the apples with the apples and the fruitcakes with the nuts, and treat it as a permanent part of their web presence. Without doing that, all the intelligent and even well meaning SEO in the world is wasted, because nobody searches for the CV of the company and nobody will link to the corporate responsibility statement.
In the world of search engines, the #1, #2 and #3 things a website needs to draw visitors are content, content and content. Visitors who arrive at a web page without any meaningful content will never link to that page. It doesn't matter if you buy their visit through advertising, steal their visit with dicey SEO tricks, or even if they stumble on it through your navigation after arriving at the front page your famous publishing company based on your brand. Without those organic links, freely given by individuals through discussion groups, blogs, and their own web pages, your web pages will never build search engine traffic beyond the long tail SEO phrase they were engineered to draw, which won't amount to a pair of beans.
There's something to be said for sticking with what you know, but publishers who aren't willing to learn a little about how search works on the web shouldn't even bother with a company website - it will just prove a distraction and a resource drain. For authors, you could do worse than reading the draft of my abandoned guide to building a platform for marketing books and researching the commercial possibilities of your work. If you want people to find your website, you have to provide content that they want to read. And if you're writing the kind of stuff that nobody wants to read, don't be surprised if nobody does.
10 comments:
About a year ago, most of what Morris says in this blog post was percolating in my brain but hadn't filtered down to how I run my website. After I found this blog and read what Morris had to say, the penny dropped and it all clicked and I spent about 3 weeks, 15 hours a day, adding content to my site and changing how it worked. Now, believe it or not, most of my bestselling books are available COMPLETELY FREE online in full - although they are chopped up and would be a difficult read and much easier to just pay for the book.
Looking back now it was the best thing I could have done. Although business and web instinct was alrady leading me down that road, Morris was the input factor that made it click and pushed me into action.
Since then I have gone from a pagerank 3 to 4, and my visitors are now about 500-700 unique's per day.
What astounds me the most though is how many people really are missing the boat on this, as Morris says. How can so many supposedly smart businesses and people completely misunderstand the internet and neglect to capitalize on such a huge resource? I think the answer is that they are too stubborn, scared, or old to learn the web and how it works. Yet, the web is what will make or break almost every company. I am very glad that I bit the bullet and really took the time to understand how it all works. I look forward to reading more of Morris' commentary on this topic in the future as the webscape is sure to change exponentially in the coming years.
Bryan
Bryan,
What's amusing is that I still have the internal debate with myself over whether or not to post even more book excerpts online. I think I could probably get away with putting all of the core content from my books online without losing sell-through as long as I spread it out a little better, as you have.
It's mainly a matter of utter laziness on my part that I haven't at least experimented with it. My general approach to web work is to post a new clump of material and then move on to the next thing. I just worry that if I start fooling around too much with optimizing and maximizing returns, I'll never move on to the next project.
But if I don't get a new project going in the next couple weeks, I'm going to look seriously at some of my book content that hasn't made it onto the website, and if it's a good match and doesn't overlap the additional material I've already published, I'll have to give it a shot.
Morris
One of my greatest weaknesses is tinkering and perfecting and optimizing ad nauseum probably beyond the ideal work / reward ratio. I too am getting that all too familiar entrepreneurial itch for the "next project" and am having to beat down the perfectionist monstor to stop tinkering with old stuff.
Bryan
Bryan,
I'm a little lacking in the perfectionist gene myself:-)
Morris
SEO needs to be taken into consideration, or the search engines, and therefore people, won’t find a site. But content is just as important. It annoys me when I find a page because it is optimised, but there is no content that is appropriate to the search.
SEO london,
I'm assuming from your handle that you work in the SEO trade. I don't deny that it can be useful, esecially for corporations with complex websites, and spammers with nothing to offer, but it's highly overrated. Google gets smarter and smarter every year, and increases their reliance on signals that have nothing to do with optimization and which are hard to fake.
Morris
Why does content work?
Google has become the most successful search engine by giving its users the most relevant results to their queries. Therefore, in order for your website to rank at the top of Google, you need to ensure that your website is the best resource for your industry.
SEO Salisbury,
I'm not sure if that was intended as a question, an answer, or a cheap SEO related link:-)
Suggesting that a website needs to be the best resource for your industry may sound good in a sales meeting with the CEO of a large corporation, but it's neither practical nor attainable for the average Joe.
The goal for publishers is to make their website the best resource for individuals interested in their subject matter, individuals, not for a whole industry or subsection thereof. I actually get people telling me that my website is a dsiaster because I include a bunch of unrelated topics. What silliness. It's the individual pages and the overall reputation that counts, as demonstrated by Wikipedia. My little one-man website gets somehwere around 20% the monthly visitors of the biggest trade publishers (multi-billion dollar corporations) and a higher percentage of my visitors are from search. Plainly, they are doing something wrong.
Morris
Hi Morris,
Thanks for your comment ;)
I do feel that SEO is very important and any content on a website needs to be relevant to the user's query and webmasters have a responsibility to get this right.
Also - It is very practical for an "average Joe" to get his site ranked within the first couple of page of Google for his keyword/phrase (unless it’s mortgages or something as equally competitive). By applying simple SEO techniques (which are very easy to find on the internet).
A website is a very powerful marketing tool and to underestimate it's marketing potential is plain madness.
SEO Salisbury,
I rejected your previous two comments because I didn't see why I should send people to page by somebody going on about the obivious without any specifics. You feel SEO is important, and going by your user name, I assume you are selling SEO services. I tell people the only SEO that matters is trivial and they should do their own. I base my opinion on 14 years of publishing online and a couple million visitors a year. Clearly we don't agree, and I'm going to leave it at that.
Morris
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