Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category
5 Simple Things You Can Do Today To Improve the Effectiveness of Your Site’s SEO
If you create content for a blog or website, incorporate these five quick tips below to help your site perform better in the search engines. SEO in simple terms is the process of “optimizing” elements both on-site and off-site, to help search engines rank your content high in the search results. The job of a search engine is to return the most relevant websites that will satisfy a user’s search. The process of optimizing your content will give it the best chance of ranking on the first page, thus providing a great opportunity to attract highly targeted traffic. Below is a list of five steps you can take today to increase the effectiveness of your site’s SEO. Continue reading 5 Simple Things You Can Do Today To Improve the Effectiveness of Your Site’s SEO
SEO consulting is NOT a game
A friend recently forwarded me a blog post about SEO consultants. It makes the premise that SEO people are evil, scammers and opportunists. In the post, the blogger claims:
Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.
Ok – so I don’t agree because if you hire a good SEO company, they can help you understand your opportunity. For example, you might have a great product and call it a kid toy. What you don’t realize is that moms out there call them toddler toys. If you don’t put that word in any of your content, you are NEVER going to rank well for the term, and there are going to be thousands of people who will never ever consider your product.
Another point – not all marketers grew up in the internet age. Some of them are very uncomfortable with the web. It also means they probably don’t understand how a website should be coded in order for the Search engines to successfully crawl through your site. If you are not coding your site correctly, you might as well be whispering your message on the internet. It is like you have an amazing house, but there is a ton of string tied around everything so you can’t see what is underneath (also know as javascript).
It is true, you don’t want to game the search engines, but you do need to know the playing field. Some people don’t have the time, talent or desire to do all of the research and technical lifting it takes, so they hire SEO companies.
New search engine feeling the pain…
So a new search engine has arrived on the scene. Cuil.com is promoting itself as the world’s biggest search engine
, but so far I’m less than impressed.
I saw a few people on Twitter trying out searches etc. and thought I’d give it a go. Two simple vanity searches (optiem & david mead) produced no results, which I thought was odd. I then tried doing the same two searches from the internal results page and not from the home page.
The search for myself yielded a nice amount of information about the singer/songwriter, of the same name, and one or two entries about me. Though one entry combined my entry and the singers bio. I know this was done by Cuil as I visited the site and my photo is nowhere to be found.
The new search for Optiem gave me a unavailable message – not good.
I’ll keep my eyes on Cuil as the pitch is that they analyze pages more than anyone else, but so far I’m not that impressed.
Web friendly PDFs
PDFs have got a bad rap over the years. Everyone knows there is nothing worse than clicking on a link within a website and getting that dreaded Acrobat toolbar appear – There you are, stuck waiting for some huge print-ready PDF to download.
Well it doesn’t have to be that way and with a little TLC, PDFs can be an asset to any website.
Size
Unless you are sharing logo’s or final proofs with a printers or agency you do not need huge 300dpi PDF files. Andy King has a great (older) tutorial on optimizing PDFs for the web on his site. Though this is for Acrobat 8.0 you can still apply a lot of the techniques with other PDF creator software.
SEO
Can Google read PDF files? Yes they can.
If you enter site:ustelecom.org “We need a cleaner environment, and we want to spend less time” into the Google search box you will get one result – A PDF file from USTelecom’s website (that Optiem built).
Another old (but good) article about SEO and PDFs, from WebProNews, still holds true. Some pointers are:
- Create PDFs in a text editor, such as MS Word
- Pay attention to meta information
- Use headings as you would on an HTML page
Links
PDFs will let you embed hyperlinks to internal and external pages. Now this may not get you higher on the SERPs, it is something fundamental for the users.
Imagine clicking on a link from a search engine and reading a PDF. Now where do you go? Back button takes you to the previous results page. Wouldn’t you rather have the visitor click on a link in the PDF back to your home page, or better yet, a contact form to request information?
Also, when you link to a PDF within your website let the user know. Fill in the title attribute as this will show up when the mouse is hovering over the link.
‹a href="pdfs/report.pdf" title="PDF of annual report"›2008 Annual Report‹/a›
You can even use the latest CSS to drop an icon indicating the file type on the page.
Accessibility
You can also make your PDFs accessible by following some of the tips above and looking at these articles:
- http://www.alistapart.com/articles/pdf_accessibility
- http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/pdfs/accessbooklet.pdf
- http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/index.html
At the end of the day PDFs are great and, with a little love and attention, can help you and your visitors.
Monday link list – 2007-07-16
- Bazooka : The free PHP tumblelog engine
- Using CSS 3 selectors to apply link icons – via CSS3.info
- SEO in the Web 2.0 era
- Clever marketing play on YouTube
- Leaflets: iPhone apps that grow on you.
- Gridgets – more iPhone goodies
- Direct to internet TV – Warren Ellis
What do you know about Google PageRank?
Well if you don’t work at Google, probably not much. There’s been a lot of speculation about this algorithm in the past and Smashing Magazine have posted a great article all about PageRank on their blog this week.
It’s great reference material and ties up quite a few loose threads about this particular bit of SEO. An updated PDF will be available from them soon, with corrections from comments made after this post went live.
You can see more of my SEO bookmarks at Ma.gnolia.