Case Study: Advanced Book Exchange

AbeBooks (Advanced Book Exchange) is an online marketplace for books. Most books listed are used, rare or out-of-print. At present, ABE lists over 100 million books from 12880 booksellers in 57 countries.

A goal internally was strong organic search engine positioning with keywords 'books' and 'used books'. Competition was the toughest in the world as we fought positional rank with Amazon, Barnes Noble and Chapters. 2000 SEO tactics involved doorway page creation (SEF), copy rewrites, affiliate linking, site resource building and keyword injections.

At 18 years old, it was an exciting first industry experience to build site resources, link partnerships and doorway pages inside such a knowledgeable web team. Company efforts paid off in early 2001 as ABE's rank surpassed Amazon, along with the goal of 1,000,000 unique page views a day.