A possible suggestion…

irishrose · Posted: Sat Dec 01, 2007 1:17 pm Post subject: A possible suggestion…

Let me preface this, I know nothing about advertising a website, garnering hits and getting attention for your site from certain searches. I’ve read most of what has been written on here about needing to put specific words on the front page to help with search engine results. But, again, I don’t really know anything about it.

Despite my total ignorance, I had a thought that I figured I would throw out here. When I come across a title that interests me, one of the things I’ll do to collect information about whether or not it is a worthy title is look for book reviews. When you type in the title of a book and "book review" in a search engine, you get these totally random websites with useless reviews. So I’ve taken to typing in the title of a periodical, "book review" and then the author and/or title of the book. So I would write: “New York Times book review, Philip Zimbardo The Lucifer Effect.” For the most part, if it is a relatively new (within a decade) release, I can find something about it searching through different titles of periodicals.

Now the reason I’m writing this. After a couple links that take me directly to the New York Times, or wherever, the next links or for random websites that reference The New York Times somewhere in their book review. So I’m wondering if you made a book review forum, and put on the front page the names of a couple newspapers, if that might help you get hits. I imagine there are more people than myself who are looking for specific newspapers’ reviews of books. So if Lorelei (two cookies for anyone who can guess what album I’m listening to right now—though you would have a couple to pick from) types in “New York Times book review, A Thousand Splendid Suns,” and booktalk has references to both the Times and the title she is searching on its front page, maybe booktalk will be further up on Lorelei’s lists of hits. And the added benefit to such a forum is you have a couple links to recent book reviews of whatever books you might be reading.

Like I said, this is all just speculation for me. But I didn’t want to ignore what might be a lucky valid suggestion just because I don’t know anything about this stuff. So, I figured, if it’s useful great; if I’m way off, no real surprise, but no harm done either.

Chris OConnor · Posted: Thu Dec 06, 2007 2:04 am Post subject:

Rose, what you're suggesting is the very essence of "SEO" or Search Engine Optimization. Check out our Yuku page located at http://booktalk.yuku.com/. You'll notice down in the Archived Books section that all of the books have a link labeled "Book Reviews of The Omnivore's Dilemma" or "Book Reviews of Pale Blue Dot" or "Book Reviews of..."

I was creating these pages thinking they would bring in a ton of traffic. Some traffic arrived through those pages, which are called "gateway pages," but overall the effort seems to have been fruitless. I think we do need to have Book Review pages, but damn it takes a long time to build them. Soon I'll start again.

I think you're thinking along the right lines. Maybe we can figure out the right recipe for new pages soon. It is very important to have lots of content. Forums have the advantage of having new content appearing daily - just from members making posts. But we need static pages too. Thanks for the suggestion. I will think this over and try to figure out a way to start building more of the type of pages you are suggesting.


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