Optimizing for Google through "Digital Magazines"

At Zmags we tell our prospects that our page flipping platform is Google optimized. Well, it is for sure, but the truth is that it depends on several factors and no guarantees on the impact can be forecasted. I will shed some light on how you can get better rankings on Google by publishing digital magazines in Zmags platform.

How the platform works with Google:

The Zmags platform is optimized for Google. (In fact it is optimized for various search engines, but we have focused on Google, so let’s keep it that way). Whenever a PDF converts into a Zmag, the process ensures that all text from the PDF is captured and made indexable. The flash and the page flips do not spoil that – we are at the PDF level here.

Whenever a digital magazine is converted, our integration ensures that Google becomes aware of that. This allows for much faster indexing of new Zmags and therefore also a much shorter time from upload to readers comes on board.

The deep-linking structure of the Zmag ensures that every spread in your digital magazine is indexed individually. Apart from being convenient for readers, who find the precise page in your digital magazine, it improves the range of possible keyword matches.

How your digital magazines content influence on Google ranking:

If you upload digital magazines by random, each phrase in the publication counts as a lottery ticket. In terms of search engine optimization each phrase is a keyword consisting of 1-4 individual words. However, the lottery game of Google is not based on luck alone. Your chances of getting a better rank on Google are aggressively increased if special phrases are repeated throughout the publication.

Example: You are publishing two publications. The first is a narrowed target cookery book focusing on Italian dishes. The other one is a digital magazine focusing on urban lifestyle in Southern Europe. The natural content of the cookery book has a much better chance of getting a good Google rank on a specific keyword like “pasta” than a broad target one, where the keyword is only mentioned a few times.

Optimize your digital magazine:

If you want to improve your rankings, Zmags offers different easy ways to do this. The most important is providing a good title containing your most important keywords. You only have 66 characters for this purpose – longer titles will be cropped and the weight of your keywords will be blurred, so write your title with care.

Deeplinking to spreads in your digital magazine will improve your rank as well. This also goes the other way around if you use Link Manager. The area of link building is vast, but for a beginning a link containing the keyword on the given spread as an anchor text will improve google rankings. Let’s have a look at the Italian kitchen again:

On your website you integrate the zmagged Italian cookery book with multiple deeplinks. On page 40 a chapter about Pizzas begin, so you copy the deeplink for that spread and ensures the word “pizza” is a part of the anchor text on your webpage. The word “pizza” should of course be found inside the cookery book and on the actual spread. You get even more successful if you can get others to link to you using “pizza” in the anchor text. But hey, forget about buying the domain pizza.com.

This is the basics on Google optimizing your digital magazines with Zmags e-publishing solutions. Please leave a comment if you have questions or some good samples to share.

Source: zmags