Every day millions of potential readers will type their concerns into a search engine – “gothic cathedrals”, “Barcelona” or “is Belén Esteban undergoing surgery” – and they will not find “The Pillars of the Earth”, “The City of Wonders” or the “Scoundrel Biography of the People’s Princess” (invented title, but I’m sure there is one like it). Millions of little missed opportunities for readers and for the book industry. The book is simply barely on the Internet (see The surprising reason why fewer and fewer books are sold every day).
But what is the reason for this curious phenomenon?
The world of books is in turmoil because the Internet is changing the rules: e-books have burst onto the scene, piracy is a threat that no one knows how to deal with, over-regulation of the sector is restricting innovation, etc. Authors, publishers and bookstores are seeking to position themselves at a time of great change in order to maintain an added value that will allow them to survive. In the midst of so much change, the sector has been more concerned with elucidating how to organize
The book and search engines
Information about books can be found on websites, blogs and digital stores. On websites, a specific book is usually mentioned along with a lot of other information, so its presence is very diluted. In blogs we find reviews of certain books. Blogs are an invention of the Internet and, as such, they rank well in search engines. That is why, when you search for a specific title on Google, it is not uncommon to find blog entries first. However, the blogger is mainly concerned with positioning his articles and not the books he is talking about.
The stores and digital catalogs of publishers do have an interest in positioning each book separately in search engines, so each work has a full dedicated page within the web portal with, at least, the book cover, the price and the shopping cart. However, there are four reasons why these pages do not rank:
1. Bad choice of url:
It’s no secret that if you want people to find your site on the Internet, it’s a good idea for the title to contain the keywords by which interested parties might search for it. However, it is not uncommon in the book world to find that urls contain a string irrelevant to SEO instead of the title of the work or the most important keywords:
- Bad example:
- Good example:
2. No keywords with potential are defined:
The best stores put a synopsis and do a little internal SEO consisting of defining some keywords, usually words from the title and author’s name, and including a basic meta-description.
Something like:
Title (<title>): THE PILLARS OF THE EARTH – KEN FOLLETT. Book summary and comments
Description (<meta name=”description” content=): THE PILLARS OF THE EARTH – KEN FOLLETT. Buy the book and view summary and comments online. Buy used and second hand books for sale.”
Keywords (/<meta name=”keywords” content=”) THE PILLARS OF THE EARTH , KEN FOLLETT, second hand books.
“The Pillars of the Earth” is probably the most widely read book in history about the Middle Ages and cathedrals. However, with the title, description and keywords described above no one will find this work in Google either by “Middle Ages” or by “cathedrals” or by any term other than “The Pillars of the Earth” or by “Ken Follet”.
3. There is no text to support the keywords:
The more text a page has, the better the search engine gets an idea of what it has to offer and, as a general rule, the more favorably it is indexed. The synopsis, by definition, is short and desirable keywords often do not even appear in it. Too little text with too few keywords means poor positioning.
4. Links are not promoted:
Naturally, everyone is looking for reviews, critiques and comments of their books on forums, websites and blogs. This creates links to the book page, which helps with SEO. But compared to any digital watch store, is linkbuilding really done properly?
Google presumes to rank the best content first, so the book and the search engines should like it. To achieve this, we can on the one hand adequately describe urls or strive to build links, but to achieve a real qualitative leap we will have to create a new format that allows us to identify powerful keywords and back them up with the right text.
The book and social networks
The greatest success of the video format is how well the combination of You Tube (or other similar channels) with social networks works. Being able to watch a video without leaving Facebook or the blog we are reading at a given moment is a contribution of immeasurable added value. The video can be taken from anywhere and pasted wherever you want, it is a born traveler.
The book, on the other hand, what can it offer? Share cover and synopsis with a link to the page that hosts them. Little else… The fifth reason why the book is not on the Internet: between the difficulty of finding information about the book we want to recommend to our friends and the unsexy nature of the resulting post, we end up not sharing it, and so the book is not very popular on social networks either.
Conclusion
The book neither positions in search engines nor spreads well virally, because it does not have an adequate digital representation. And this is a problem for both traditional and electronic books.
Or will we have to get used to watching videos to encourage us to buy books (an interesting possibility offered by the most innovative ones, see an example here)? The answer in the next article: How to promote a book on the Internet and social networks?
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