More and more, success in the book business will depend on how and why readers discover books. That sounds like common sense, and it is. It also sounds like the same challenge publishers have faced for decades, and it is. But it’s a new challenge too because as online consumers become more sophisticated and learn to identify and locate books that appeal to them individually, it’s essential that publishers and their products turn up through a variety of online searches.

Yesterday, a popular search term leading readers to the Melville House site was “novella publishers”.

These results are based on a number of factors, most importantly pagerank, keywords, Web site traffic, search history, and perceived value.

Because Melville House enjoys lots of traffic on a daily basis, and because many people link to content on our site, we have strong pagerank. The keywords used in the search, “novella publishers” are geared directly toward our site as well, as you can see the words “novella” and “publishers” in the result’s descriptive text.

Obviously, when I searched for “novella publishers” on my office computer, to see how we ranked, Google recognized that my search history and perceived value both earned high marks for Melville House (phew!).

But this also was likely true for the outside readers actually conducting these searches. Using Analytics, we can see where such searches lead our readers, which pages they visit on our site, how long they stay, and much more. This information can then be used again when we assess which keywords and search terms we need to work on, and which ones are doing well.

SEOMOZ clearly states the importance of understanding keywords:

Keyword research is one of the most important, valuable, and high return activities in the search marketing field. Through the detective work of puzzling out your market’s keyword demand, you not only learn which terms and phrases to target with SEO, but also learn more about your customers as a whole. The usefulness of this intelligence cannot be overstated – with keyword research you can predict shifts in demand, respond to changing market conditions, and produce the products, services, and content that web searchers are already actively seeking.

In this example, Melville House came up as the number one result on Google. Since “novella publishers” is a relatively unique term, meaning that competition is not that fierce for a top spot on Google, and combined with the factors mentioned above, we had a recipe for success from the get-go.

What we have to discern still is whether our readers were looking for a publisher for their new novella, or if they’re interested in purchasing from our Art of the Novella series. We can make an educated guess, though, by following the pages they viewed.

It’s plain to see why this information is important for publishers. By being nimble, and understanding our readers, we can bolster the chances that book buyers find us rather than the competition.

The pressing question now, of course, is what happens when in fact there is fierce competition for a search term. How, for example, can a publisher stand out when it comes to a reprinted title?

Stay tuned, that’s one we’ll cover later this week …