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Technical Book Publishers: A Search Report Card
March 22, 2006
SEO Speedwagon is launching a series of "Search Report Card" articles that explore the state of search in various verticals. This is the first such article, and it examines how well technical book publishers are utilizing search and user behavior within their sites.
The purpose of this article is to explore, using a representative (but unscientific) sampling of industry-leading publishers' web sites, the level of focus currently being applied to search.
[Some history: I spent about 10 years in technical book publishing, both in-house and as a freelance editor. When I left the industry, search was just warming up, so it's been interesting to apply some current SEO benchmarks to some former-life web sites.]
Background: Challenges in the Computer Book Industry
Offline technical publishing currently faces many potential obstacles, but that's nothing new. Historically, one of the industry's greatest threats has been the contrast of the paper-publishing timeline versus the shelf life of the technology covered in the book. In other words, publish an 800-page book on June 1st about "version 4.5" of any given program, and 28 days later, "version 5.0" goes into beta testing.
Today, the old threats remain, and they're bolstered by new ones. Even Alan Meckler takes time off from buying companies to weigh in on potential risks to the model (although his post focuses more on trade mags). And then there's Amazon, the Silvio Dante of distribution partners: Nice hair, but do you really want to get into the Cadillac with him?
Publisher Sites Examined
I picked seven major computer book publishers at random:
Note: Wiley purchased Sybex in 2005, but the two maintain separate web sites, and thus both seemed suitable candidates. Peachpit and Que are both owned by Pearson Technology Group, but again, their products appear on separate web sites.
Methodology Used
I took a two-pronged approach to evaluating the sites for their respective search awareness.
First, I checked over some basics. The following criteria, taken individually, don't mean a lot, because lack of one aspect can often be accounted for by presence of another. But as a whole, they show signs of which publishers are really paying attention to search.
- Sitemap. This represents a check for a Google Sitemap file - either sitemap.xml or sitemap.xml.gz. (All sites had a traditional sitemap page.) Absence of a Google sitemap file isn't necessarily damning, especially if the site is already well indexed. Results: Only O'Reilly appeared to have a sitemap XML page.
- Custom 404. A simple test for a error-trapping 404 page.
Results: All sites had a custom 404 page. Que and Peachpit have a 404-style page in place, but it doesn't produce the correct HTTP header code. Instead, it uses a series of 302 redirects before settling on an error page with a 200 code. As we've discussed before (here and here), incorrect header codes in error pages can produce problems.
I also picked one backlist title from each publisher to perform some random on-page checks. The title was published in late 2005 or early 2006 - plenty of time to be naturally indexed, barring any obstacles.
- Unique Title. Does the page devoted to the randomly selected backlist book have a unique title page? Second, does the title contain the book's ISBN?
Results: Each publisher offers a unique page title for the pages devoted to a specific book. Strangely, however, none inserts the ISBN number in the title. ISBN searches make up a small (but not insignificant) percentage of book searches. Because the publisher is the first party to receive ISBNs as they are issued, they should own the query. - Meta Desc. Does the page have a unique meta description?
Results: Only O'Reilly and Microsoft supply their pages with unique meta descriptions (or meta descriptions at all, for that matter). Meta descriptions are a very easy place to put a book's category and description - especially if the book page template is item/list-based and doesn't contain much space for narrative text. - Deep URL. Is the URL of the specific book indexed at all three major engines (GYM)?
Results: None of the publishers appeared to have indexing problems, although due to the dynamic nature of some of the sites, I could easily navigate to a version of the book page whose URL differed from the one indexed at the engine. (Example: URL obtained by site nav and via SERP) - Robots.txt. Check for the presence of robots.txt file.
Results: All sites contain a robots.txt file.
While O'Reilly seems to hit on all cylinders, no publisher is completely ignorant to search. As I suggested earlier, these could be considered fairly superficial criteria for search awareness. They're a series of "little picture" elements that are important, but not all-important.
Second, I tried to consider the bigger picture.
Generally speaking, for most tech publishers, the current search strategy appears to be targeting their specific products. "Computer books." "C# programming books." "isbn 0470009241." And so on. And for the most part, they're doing a decent job of achieving those goals, even though sites like Amazon and smaller, one-off sites are taking a bite too.
Most publishers, however, aren't even coming close to fully exploiting the search traffic they could be. Why? Because they're busy fighting for long-tail crumbs of "book" related searches while in addition, they could be grabbing the valuable keyword torso as well.
Here's an example. For every searcher querying [c programming book], 60 search for [c programming]. For every searcher querying [windows xp book], 240,000 search for [windows xp]. For every searcher querying [xhtml book], 8000 search for [xhtml].
In other words, publishers need to become known for their subject areas - not books about their subject areas.
Is it harder? Sure. But can it be done? Yes. Who is more qualified to rank for a subject area term than a publisher with a backlist of a dozen titles or more in that subject area? Very few sites, providing the publisher uses its assets efficiently.
So what's the secret? There isn't just one. It requires an entirely new look at the structure of the publisher's web site, external sites, link-building strategy, and the role of the books themselves in the grand scheme. Following are some ways that publishers can leverage or generate the content necessary to improve traffic for their book topics.
- Bring your authors home. Computer book authors have a lot to say. I worked with dozens of them, and 90% of the time, if a book had "page count issues" during development, it was too many pages, not too few. These people live to write, and blogging has been a godsend for many of them. Publishers must provide a blogging platform for each author, and strongly encourage its use. Give them the main and right columns, and keep the left one for yourself.
Amazon is already offering a blogging space to authors (known as (gasp) "plogs"), and good authors are taking them up on it. The issue here isn't that Amazon might sell your book instead of your own shopping cart selling it. Instead, as I pointed out a couple weeks ago, Amazon doesn't care whose book they sell. With every click on Amazon, the odds that your book will be purchased are diluted - even if the odds of a book purchase increase.
- Make all roads lead to (and spring from) specific titles. Publishers have at least three "brands" in each title: The author, the series, and the topic. The URL for each unique book is the cross-section of all three:
As such, the book title URL should be the fountainhead for all types of content, from comments and reviews to coding samples to related announcements to the aforementioned author blog.
- Treat your backlist like a blog. When it comes to site architecture, think of the similarities between a publisher's site and a typical weblog. New titles (posts) emerge and are filed under specific topic headers (categories). Just as Engadget's "Gaming" category receives regular updates via new posts, so should your ".NET" category receive regular updates via each new published title. Reviews (comments) are added regularly, and all hope that the author (poster) will engage the audience in a dialogue.
- Cultivate new backlinks based on your content. Without getting too specific, if you're wondering why you can rank well for [.net programming book] but not [.net programming], one smart place to look is your backlinks. Do a query for your topic, both with and without "book," and take a look at the sites linking into the above-the-fold placeholders. Would any of the new content described earlier lead to incoming links from those different types of sites? If all your backlinks are coming from publishing-based sites, do you realize what Google considers synonymous with [~publishing]?
Who Gets It?
While none of the publishers appears to have fully grappled with search from a holistic perspective, many are approaching search intelligently, mostly via consumer-generated methods like blogging:
- It's hard not to recognize O'Reilly's Radar blog as a dominant force in the publisher-as-tech-blogger circles, but the tie-in from blog to backlist is a little lacking. Still, the book site rocks, and smart programs like Rough Cuts help to propel titles like Ruby on Rails Up and Running into SERPs for queries like [ruby on rails programming] - several months before the final book is even pubbed.
- At the acquisitions end of the product chain, Jim Minatel's Wrox Blog takes a microscopic look at the publisher-author relationship, and Joe Wikert's simply-but-smartly titled Book Publisher Blog looks at the bigger picture, while at the same time owning [publisher blog].
- While somewhat lacking in text, the Que individual title pages - via their breadcrumb nav and title-specific list - offer nice links to each of the three axes (author/subject/series) referred to in the graphic above.
Conclusion
Outside the comfortable surroundings of SEO/SEM, we're sometimes shocked by a vertical for whom search isn't at the forefront, and as SEOs, it's good for us to gain that perspective. Search should be a significant part of a bigger picture, not the picture itself. But in the face of ever-growing threats to their business model, publishers would be wise to better capitalize on searcher behavior. In a way, publishers are lucky. Many verticals, as we'll show in the coming months, need to start creating assets by the bucketload. Fortunately for publishers, all they really need to do is start utilizing the assets they already have.
All posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at March 22, 2006 10:23 AM
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