Amazon SEO

Reading the usual SEO posts today, somebody mentioned why there isn’t a market for Amazon SEO. That’s a good question.

What is Amazon SEO? It’s the process of doing SEO for a product so that it shows up at the top of a search. After all, there HAS to be a correlation among top ranking books and sales of said books.

Let’s take a look. My book currently shows up at #1 for an amazon search of “Internet slang” but it’s nowhere to be found if you just search for “slang.”

That’s got to be hurting my sales eh?

So what factors might come in to play when searching Amazon? Well, there’s title, Author, description, product details, and reviews.

As an author, I personally get to choose the Title, Author, and Description. The details are things like language, publisher, weight, etc so we can assume they don’t really matter here.

As a community, the rest of the web gets to write the reviews. Thankfully you need a valid account to review an item, so we don’t have tons of keyword spammed reviews (yet.)

It seems to me that the bulk of ranking on Amazon would come down to your title and description. Unfortunately there’s really no way for an author to update his description to test some SEO wording. As you can see my description is written more for the customer without regard to the Amazon search algorithm (whoops!)

This doesn’t mean your book should be authored by “John Q. Bad Credit Auto Loans”, but it’s definitely something I’d think about before you publish your product for sale.

It’s worth mentioning that this idea also applies to Ebay, Barnes and Noble, CafePress, or just about anywhere else that you can sell something. Is this the next step for SEO? We’ll see.

May 1st, 2007