Search Engine Rankings, April 2007

I'll make this a monthly update - good for me to look at this monthly anyway and see which way I am moving. The first number is the current ranking, the second in parenthesis is from last month:

For Google:
personalized books - #21 (#36)
personalized children's books - #96 (#114)
personalized childrens books - #46 (#57)
personalized story books - #13 (#16) TOP TWENTY!
personalized book - #9 (#10) TOP TEN!

For Yahoo:
personalized books - #11 (#9) DROPPED OUT OF THE TOP TEN
personalized children's books - #50 (#50)
personalized childrens books - (#82) #64
personalized story books - #18 (#10) DROPPED OUT OF THE TOP TEN
personalized book - #13 (#10) DROPPED OUT OF THE TOP TEN


The Good: Improvement in all five keywords on Google. A top twenty and a top ten ranking on Google, and three top twenty rankings on Yahoo.

The Bad: Decreases in 4 of 5 keywords on Yahoo, including dropping out of the top ten for 3 keywords. The only ranking that didn't drop was for "personalized children's books" which stayed at a lousy #50 position.

The Ugly: Still have terrible rankings from both search engines for "personalized children's books" and "personalized childrens books". These are oft searched terms that I need to do better on.

As stated last month, for the web site to be truly successful, I need to crack the top ten on Google for personalized books. We are getting closer - #21 this time.

A 200 dollar book!

So one of the used books I sell on Amazon sold for 200 bucks - pretty good since I paid less than a dollar for it. What book is worth 200 dollars you ask? This book was something call Madrigal's magic key to French, which if you follow the link you will discover that the cheapest copy offered now on Amazon goes for about $440 dollars. So my buyer got a pretty good deal. (My copy was not in the best shape - but I probably still undersold it.) Now if I could just sell a 100 more 200 dollar books, I'd be doing pretty well...

And I still need to get that feedback rating up so that I too can overcharge for books.

Tooting my daughter's horn post

We just found out a couple days ago that our older daughter was a River of Words Environmental Poetry finalist. Out of tens of thousands of entries her poem was selected as one of about fifty finalists. Pretty cool. The best part is her poem will be published in the 2007 anthology, River of Words: The Natural World as Viewed by Young People. She gets a copy of the book and they'll also donate copies in her name to her school library and the public library. I must admit I'm just a little jealous that she will be published before me (actually I expect both of my very talented daughters to be published before me...)

Anyway we will go to the Library of Congress in May for the awards ceremony. Now if I can just figure out how to get the personalized book website url into the press release that we send to the local paper about it, I can start exploiting my children's successes already...

Taxes and Stomach Virus Blues Post

So I have been working on the taxes (with the help of TurboTax Home and Business) most of the day while my older daughter whiles the day away in her room with a stomach virus (last night was hell - I did have to take a break or two to sanitize the bathroom...)

Good news - looks like we get a sizable refund from the feds this year (I guess there is some advantage to operating a money-loosing business.)

Other notes:
- my Amazon Context links have started to show up.
- No word from the good doctor on the result of the 'ol brain mri.