Some sites will try to use PDFs for crucial information instead of making them web pages. I think this is a bad idea and recommend against it. In fact, being the Diva, I insist they rework them as web pages.
Whitepapers, technical articles and surveys, on the other hand, work well as PDFs. They need to be optimized too, though, to give your web site added value in the SERPs.
The article at Search Marketing by Galen De Young titled What you don’t know about optimizing PDFs can hurt you | 17 Strategies for success is a comprehensive guide to optimizing PDFs for search engines, searchers, and site visitors. Referencing an article on Marketing Sherpa, he goes far beyond it and and covers important factors that were omitted by Marketing Sherpa. Included are helpful screenshots so you can’t go wrong.
Given that SEO works a lot differently when optimizing documents in PDF format, if you have them on your site this is a must read.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Share This
Jeff Quipp from Search Engine People has a great post on 50+ Sites to Help You Bury Negative Posts About You or Your Company.
What if you don’t have any negative publicity, but you’re also not showing up for positive results? Use his tactics for online reputation management to enhance yours.
Go down the list of his suggested sites, building a profile on each, with one of your top tier keyword phrases (or your company name) as your profile name. Make sure you have prominent links to your site within the profile.
Over time you should start seeing your keyword phrase moving up the first page of Google via the various site profiles. This is an especially good tactic if you’re trying to build a brand.
As Jeff says in his article, this action can also help protect your reputation in the event an angry client or someone else tries cause you harm online.
Popularity: 5% [?]
Share This
StumbleUpon is now banning sites that are using the social media site to increase exposure. This means no more giving your own blog or site a thumbs up, thinking you are are just saying "Hey come check this out!"
No contacting your friends on Stumble, either, asking them to give you a thumbs up. Nope, that’s way too egregious. Now you must be found by random people who are so impressed by your site or blog they’re moved to give you a thumbs up.
Well, take heart, there’s an easy enough way around this issue, although it will cost you money (surprise). Just pay Stumbleupon for advertising your site at $.05 per click, at whatever daily rate you choose. If you can’t give yourself a free stumble, you can pay $100 and get a couple thousand random stumbles.
I tried the StumbleUpon advertising several months ago for one of my sites. I spent $20 over a 5 day period, and got mostly thumbs up, when visitors bothered to vote (most didn’t). Those paid visitors averaged about 2 nanoseconds each on my site, so I can’t call it quality traffic, just traffic.
If you’re looking for numbers, that’s pretty inexpensive, but if you’re looking for quality visitors who are interested in what you have on your site, it’s not worth a plugged nickel.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Share This
Google has been testing a new search algorithm, where searches with This Type of Capitalization, THIS TYPE OF CAPITALIZATION, and no capitalization return different results.
I’ve been testing it, and with some searches I get the same results, but with other I get vastly different results. Try it out for yourself and see what happens.
For the life of me I can’t figure out the reasoning behind this. As we all know, some people type in caps all the time and many don’t capitalize at all, especially in searches. Why does Google see fit to offer different results? What is the point?
If Google decides to utilize this new twist on a regular basis, it will make SEO even crazier than it’s already become - or at least make me crazier.
I’d love to hear what you think of this strange search development.
Popularity: 15% [?]
Share This
April 23, 2008 – 12:49 pm
Cleverly named, ScratchBack is an interesting concept.
I first noticed the ScratchBack widget on DazzlinDonna’s blog. For $5 you can have a (no follow) ad link on her blog. The ad is placed at the top of the list, and as other advertisers join, the link drops, until it has dropped off the list of 15 ad links. I added the Diva to it (pretty cheap advertising) and will be watching to see if it brings me any traffic.
If you’re in a very niche market this may be a clever and inexpensive way to advertise your products within the niche itself. Go check out the directory and find a blog or two that are in your niche that you can get an inexpensive link on. For the price it’s certainly worth a try. This is a fairly new program, so the directory isn’t filled with a lot of bloggers just yet, but I can see it becoming popular. The links are no-follow, which doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t get any link juice, but do it more for the traffic than any thing else.
If you want a widget for your blog, you can choose a pre-designed widget or customize your own. You can also pre-approve advertisers before they’re added to your widget, or let the system add them automatically. Once you’ve signed up for the widget, you can add your site to the ScratchBack Directory for advertisers to find you.
I added the ScratchBack widget to my blog just for the heck of it, so if you feel like spending 5 bucks you can have a text link on SEO Diva. Just think of the cachet that will bring you!
Popularity: 29% [?]
Share This
