Thursday, November 13, 2008

Alternative Discovery and SEO - Feeds, PDFs, and Blog SEO

We are live blogging, this session from Salon B @ the Las Vegas Convention Center, PubCon 2008. Because it is live, there is no editorial or proofing process. The moderator is Joe Laratro.

PDFs, DOCs and feeds each have idiosyncrasies for optimization which can help your site rank. This session is going to dive deep into these formats to pass along best practices.

George Aspland, Founder & President, eVision, LLC is presenting, "optimizing PDFs for search engines." He wants us to seek rankings and more click-throughs from search engine result listings for .pdfs. He suggests that you create active links within .pdfs to increase the number of readers who visit your website or contact you while viewing your .pdfs online. Give search engines paths to find content on your website, which may help for internal inking.

Use mostly formatable text because search engines can't read text in images. Google can not create a meaningful description from an image. Optimize text in a .pdf documents according to SEO best practices. Pay special attention to the first headline. Google creates listings from text contained in the .pdf and the words and phrase being in bold, just like it does with HTML web pages. Tip: Rebuild old .pdfs if needed. Above all, update the document title, which is as important as the classic HTML title tag is for SEO.

If you don't have a title, Google extracts text from the .pdf's to create the listing, which it won't help "entice" people to click-through .There are many applications to create .pdf titles. Take note that Word 2003 usually adds "Microsoft Word" to the document title. It's best practices to update .pdfs in Adobe Acrobat. The document title usually becomes the headline in the organic Google listing.

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