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Overlapping Blueprints: A multi-layered approach to metadata and SEO

In a recent webinar organized by OCLC, Laura Dawson presented a very simple, yet essential definition of metadata: “Metadata is data about data.” In this equation, the latter ‘data’ refers specifically to the content of a pBook or eBook. The former ‘data’ is a collection of certain pieces of information about the content that we use to categorize, place, shelve, describe, identify, locate, etc. 

Thankfully, there was no limit imposed on how much of this former ‘data’ there could be. And, while many publishers agree on set pieces of metadata, albeit in a de-facto manner, this need not be the case. Expanding on Laura’s definition, let’s look at some examples of items that could be used effectively within the metadata mix, creating a system of layered metadata from within. 

In-line code: Code within the XML structure of content is going to be a very important place to lace strategy into bookselling. The more online discoverability maintains and expands its role in sales of book products, the more publishers are going to have to get smart about the search game. Some publishers have begun to do this already, others are exploring their options, but ultimately, it will become essential for publishers to include advanced SEO techniques in both their content itself as well as the coded wrapper it resides in. From finding hiding places to secret keywords, to tagging content properly and effectively, to refining titles and subtitles outwardly, to changing how things are done on copyright pages and TOCs, in-line code for both pBooks and eBooks is perhaps the new marketing plan. If you are not doing this, start now.  

Descritive copy: While our conception of metadata has expanded to be included in what we consider ‘marketing,’ the reverse movement has happened less so. Descriptive copy, being actual marketing copy, which feeds out to online accounts, via ONIX or other delivery method, is indeed part of a book’s metadata proper. It describes the content in a longer form than tags and codes, provides an inticing snippet to the consumer, and represents the whole of the product. This copy, like in-line metadata, needs to be optimized for search, as it will appear many places across the internet driving up the book’s collective page rank. Descriptive copy, while having a duty of its own, also needs to play a role behind the scenes in improving discoverability through search. The more keywords a publisher can integrate and the more search-friendly a publisher can make this copy the greater the benefitw will be for our products in the long run. 

Website SEO: Any search optimization performed on web properties related to each book should be related and integrated with search optimization perfomed on the content itself. With the ability to load keywords into XML codes, and, eventually, into the text itself, a strong SEO strategy needs to move beyond the content that we have, beyond the descriptive copy, and onto the streets, so to speak. At the very least, the web team that is setting up websites, landing pages, author blogs, and eCommerce pages must converse with teams that are performing keyword development for editorial and marketing purposes.

Social media: Social media outlets are wonderful for interacting with customers and peers alike, but despite the dissemination of huge amounts of information online, few have begun talking about SEO as it realtes to social media. It is important to note that because social media outlets allow for us to talk about our books, they are additional areas for dessimination of metadata. On the various platforms used, user profiles are highly trafficked, bios are read by many, tweets, syndicated blog posts, messages, and answers to questions are spit out by the million every day. It’s time to get smart about these missives and start loading them with keywords, pushing our SEO strategy to the next level. If every book had, say, 50 keywords that must be included in as many places as possible, social media marketing teams would be hardpressed not to use them thus drawing more attention to a book’s presence. It will not be long before we start using ‘heavy tweets’ in our daily marketing activities. 

Paid Search/SEM: If you are engaging in SEM as well as SEO, it remains important to integrate any paid campaigns with the non-paid ones. Good paid search marketers can tell you exactly what people are typing into Google and how many of them are clicking on a link to your books. This information can and should be used by the rest of the team to develop keywords. Here, it is essential to remember that the conversation is two-way. Making sure all of these layers sync up is more important, I believe, than simply performing the tasks of implementing each. To simply make insular teams responsible for each of these items is to miss the point. There is more metadata than we think, beyond the ISBN, and the tags, and the copy, and the pub date, and the format, and the page count, and the price. There is a whole world of metadata out there that we can exploit. The nature of the internet today is that there is no ‘one-stop shop’. There is only multiplicity. 

There is one last piece of metadata that I wanted to mention, something that someone perhaps much smarter than I will figure out: 

User-gen: Perhaps the most difficult area to navigate, because we have little to no control, user generated content, like customer reviews, is also part of a product’s metadata. It is data about the data. Simply because we do not create it, nor what much control over it’s distribution, does not make it any less effective in describing, identifying, and categorizing our content. In fact, even the smallest items can be of important. Let’s say a certain user is highly active at leaving review on a certain site. Other users who may become familiar with these people may, eventually, begin looking for or even SEARCHING for specific user names in order to follow reviews from a trusted source. With sites like Shelfari, GoodReads, and other sharing sites and options being built into eBooks, user generated content and metadata is going to become perhaps more voluminous that publisher generated metadata. How, in the future, are we going to be able to leverage this data?

Rethinking the Marketing Mix: Metadata as marketing priority by Laura Dawson

During this past ISBN Hour on Twitter (every Friday at noon Eastern), I was discussing the use of metadata as SEO. Along with Andy Weissberg at Bowker, I’d just given a presentation about this subject at Digital Book World’s Digitize Your Career editorial and marketing forum, and I was digesting what we’d discussed for those who couldn’t be there.

And one publisher asked me if I felt that a good metadata strategy was better than a straightforward PR campaign for any given book.

My response, at the time, was that it isn’t an either/or situation. You need both. But that got me thinking about the various factors in book marketing – what’s effective and necessary to get your books noticed.

1. A good book. Marketing can solve a lot of things. It cannot solve the problem of a book that is not useful or entertaining. The best books are, of course, both. But even one or the other is sufficient to establish a marketing campaign around.

2. Good metadata. Metadata describes the book. Most book shopping is done online these days – even if people are buying in a physical store, they are doing their research online. Metadata – title, author, ISBN, price, publisher, pub date, description, BISAC codes – is like a big neon sign directing consumers to the book. Without good metadata, you can have the best book in the world and nobody can find out about it. Metadata generates keywords. Those keywords are what your customers are typing into Google. Without good metadata, you’re leaving customers without what they want. It is the ultimate SEO strategy.

3. Word of mouth. This is the least tangible factor – the one that’s the hardest to generate and yet the most important. Creating a word-of-mouth campaign requires that you drop the hard-sell, and appeal to individuals. Is this cost-effective? Well…yes. In a phrase: ENGAGE THE INDIES. The best word-of-mouth comes from independent booksellers. Their livelihoods are on the line. They care passionately about books. If your book is good (see #1), they will sell the hell out of it.

4. Social media. This is word of mouth in another form. There are over 400 million people on Facebook. There are over 105 million people on Twitter. We don’t have any statistics for how many people read blogs, but Technorati indexes over 100 million blogs. The Internet is how people talk to one another when they are not face-to-face. It is how people find out about books. What gets tweeted, blogged about, and shared on Facebook gets indexed in Google. To opt out of social media marketing is to silence yourself and your message. And of course, underpinning social media marketing is…? A good metadata strategy so you can point buyers to where they can purchase the book. So you can use metadata for SEO. So you can track consumers’ responses.

5. Conventional PR campaigns. Yes, people still watch TV. They still read newspapers (albeit online – see #4). They pass a Barnes & Noble with a sign in the window that the author is coming to town. Terry Gross and Don Imus still book authors. These things are – still, even now – important. But without the other four firmly in place, this fifth strategy isn’t going to mean much.

The role of the book marketer is somewhat limited – she cannot control the quality of the book she’s given to market, obviously. She cannot control what booksellers think of the book – however entertaining and/or useful she may find it herself. She cannot control how virally the book will take off on the Internet. Two things she CAN control: how accurate and robust the metadata is, and how much she’s going to spend on a traditional PR campaign.

In the past, publishers sold books to bookstores, and people bought them and read them – and that was the conversation. With an exponential increase in the way people talk to one another, publishers are not dictating the conversation anymore. The marketing process has become democratized. The publisher is only in control of what she owns – the quality of the book she’s acquired, the quality of the metadata around the book, and the amount of money she’s going to spend on advertising. But just because you are not in control of the conversation, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t enter it. Nobody likes being shouted at. Engage your booksellers. Engage your readers. Talk with them, not at them. And back up your conversation with what you can control.

Laura Dawson is a 20+ year veteran of the book industry, specializing in its technology issues. She has worked at Doubleday, Muze, Barnes & Noble.com, SirsiDynix, and as an independent consultant whose clients have included McGraw-Hill, Chuckwalla, Scholastic, Capstone Press, Cengage, Alibris, Barnes & Noble, Ingram, Baker & Taylor, and Bowker.

She lives in Brooklyn with her two daughters, and a hamster named Batman.

Expanding the Marketing Reach: Establishing new touch points in digital product development

New products demand new ways of thinking. Right now, most publishing houses are creating “straight conversions” of their content in order to make it available on eReader devices. Others have begun to think about functionality and how they can improve the user experience of reading eBooks. But, what about marketing having a say in product development?

The current print cycle goes something like this: editorial acquires a “title”, receives a manuscript which they then edit (with everything that entails), then sends said manuscript to production who oversees copyediting and typesetting. Production subsequently shuttles the manuscript to manufacturing. In the meantime, the design group is designing a cover which ends up in at manufacturing at the same time as the manuscript does. Some time around the production and manufacturing phases (often depending on the title) marketing and publicity start a campaign to raise awareness and promote the title. Many times, sales result for the marketing department’s ability to get the book into the right hands (read: in the hands of reviewers) and for the requisite buzz to be created in the market place. Sadly, the same seems to be the process with eBook production.

What if we started using the functionality offered to us by eBooks and eReaders in a strategic way? In fact, even minor changes made to metadata for eBooks and small considerations from the marketing department before the development phase of an eBook can boost sales.

Some things to consider

• SEO: How can you heighten searchability of eBook titles through data, content and metadata? With a digital product, you have to consider that the only distribution will be online, which is governed by rules of search. Consumers are not going to find your book just because it’s there; like any other web property, you must drive traffic to your eBooks in order for them to sell. Whether we are selling direct to consumer on your website or through Amazon, Sony, BN.com or Apple, it is imperative that we as publishers lead our consumers to our products. Upon quick glance: titles should be adapted for search optimization, metadata should be vetted by marketing for SEO opportunities and tweaking, content itself should be optimized for search. Ideally, the entirety of eBooks content would be written with SEO principles in mind. While this is not always possible, many times new introductions, epilogues, postscripts, conclusions and connective matter are created for eBooks that are different from their print counterparts. These items can be exploited. It is also possible to hide keywords in the proverbial front- and back-matter, regardless of where they appear in an eBook.

• BISAC: If you are considering SEO and product development, BISAC just became your best friend. For a publisher’s print business, BISAC is important to ensure that your book is shelved in the right place in a bricks and mortar retail store. But, when there are no shelves, BISAC categories are literally extra bits of information that defines you book, yet rarely will show up on an online retailer’s product page. Every eBook should have three (as) diverse (as possible) yet pertinent BISAC categories, to cover the gamut of possible demographic groups.

• Marketing as content: Can strategic marketing be inserted in between chapters? Is the (incredibly) soft sell an option? How about ‘back ads’? Every eBook, just like it’s print counterpart, has a natural progression with breaks in the text. How can marketing exploit these digital nooks and crannies to gently remind customers of other products in which they might be interested? This strategy is delicate to execute, but could pay off nicely: if the consumer is oblivious to you marketing to them in this way, you’re doing it right.

• Customization: While it seems that no one has been able to collect substantial user data yet, data is coming and it’s coming quickly. Publishers are beginning to crack the nut of what could be a proverbial treasure trove of user data. As new data and user analytics roll in, product development should be consistently (and nimbly) adapting to integrate trends and stay ahead of future developments. Data analysis and market research leads to better understanding our customer; this is our opportunity to deliver a truly customized product. Also, what about custom bundling of products with other products or other formats? The technology needed to offer dynamic bundling is possible now.

• Bridging the gap: The eBook market is a virtual playground for experimentation and innovation within our business. While editorial may be experimenting with new contracts and royalty structures, marketing should be experimenting with new ways of reaching audiences, growing audiences and maintaining audiences. New opportunities present themselves every day, new technology makes things possible that was not possible just one week before. One area that has huge potential is the offline-online campaign; combining components and both offline and online elements to create a truly interactive campaign. This is something that has yet to be done in a successful way, and is an area of almost infinite opportunity with regards to digital products.

• Incentives and loyalty: eBooks are a great way of creating brand loyalty: the cost of entry is low and the the delivery method simple and cost-free (for all intents and purposes). In regards to their customers, more then ever, publishers should consider putting the next product in their hand. Why not offer two for one? Or offer a survey which leads to data gathering and better demographic information? Because of the costs involved, we can not only afford to give away free copies of our eBooks, but we are teaching our customers to come back to us for digital products when they are ready for more.

In terms of digital books, the rules have yet to be defined. While the marketing department may not have had such breadth of reach into product development in the past, it’s time to start breaking the conventional rules of print publishing and experiment beyond anything that we ever dreamed possible with print matter. The ideas laid out above are merely the tip of the iceberg of what can and should be possible within our new digital business plans. It seems that the greatest barrier to entry to becoming strategic digital publishers is getting past the “that’s the way it’s always been done” sentiment. However, the major flaw in that argument is this: when it comes to eBooks there is no “way it’s always been done.” It’s the wild wild West, now go and find some gold.