The source documents from which PDFs are created are often very expensive to write and design (e.g., brochures, product sheets, etc.) Yet, when it comes to making a PDF, B2B marketers invest a couple minutes to convert such documents into a PDF and post it. What a waste! If you’re going to make a significant investment in a printed piece, why wouldn’t spend even an hour to help ensure your prospects can find it?

Some tips on optimizing your PDF:

• Make sure you create text-based PDFs
• Specify document properties for the PDF
• Keep the content of the PDF focused
• Specify the reading order
• Influence meta descriptions
• Tag your PDFs
• Build links into PDFs
• Verify your links
• Save the PDF as an accessible version
• Optimize the file size for search
• Enable your PDFs for fast web view
• Watch where you place PDFs on your site
• Use keyword-rich anchor text to link to PDFs
• Don’t do anything in a PDF that you wouldn’t do in a web page
• Recheck things before you post the PDF

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What is the Google sandbox?
When a website is brand new, it doesn’t take long for the Google robots to find it and begin cataloging the pages. Although Google has learned about the site and has indexed its pages, it won’t show up when a search is performed. What’s believed to happen is that the website is held off to the side, out of the listings, in a sort of limbo. Google knows about the page and site, but doesn’t display them, and this is called being in Google’s sandbox.

Why does Google have this sandbox?
Google’s credibility and desirability as a search engine depend on its producing high quality results. One of the reasons for Google’s success is how easy its search engine is for people to use and quickly get to quality web pages that answer their questions. There may be millions of web pages that mention the capacity of modern freight trains, for example, but when someone performs a search for that information, the pages that Google thinks answer those questions best appear on the top of the list.

Google, to maintain its standards as a search engine, seems to have instituted the sandbox in 2004 as a way to avoid placing brand new websites on its results pages. While anyone can create a website loaded with keywords and link to it from many other websites, Google holds off on displaying the page until it has established its legitimacy. Trusted or established websites, therefore, are more likely to be displayed while your new website is nowhere to be found.

How can I tell if my website is in Google’s sandbox?
If you study your site’s visitor or activity statistics, you will see the Googlebot visiting your website. What you won’t see while your site is on “probation,” or in what’s called the Google sandbox, is your page showing up on Google’s results pages if you search for any of your page’s keywords. You can confirm that the Googlebot has successfully found and indexed your page by searching for the actual domain name, but while the home page of your site will show up, none of the interior ones will be listed.

How can I get my webpage out of the “sandbox” and onto the SERPs?
As of this time, there’s nothing you can do but wait. After what Google considers to be a reasonable time, about six to eight months, it feels that your site is trustworthy and will begin displaying results for all of your pages. Google has been indexing and cataloging your pages from the first time its robots visited, it just wasn’t displaying those results when someone searched.

When you examine your site’s activity logs, you’ll notice many robots visiting, and you should remember that MSN, Yahoo!, and other search engines do not appear to have a sandbox. While Google may immediately display your pages, other search engines will, and you should be able to find your site listed when you perform a search on Yahoo!, Ask.com, MSN, and other search engines.

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Welcome to Cuil—the world’s biggest search engine. The Internet has grown. We think it’s time search did too. The Internet has grown exponentially in the last fifteen years but search engines have not kept up—until now. Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

From cuil’s FAQ:

How does Cuil improve Search Results:

Cuil’s goals are to index the whole Web, to analyze deeply its pages and to organize results in a rich and helpful way that allows you to explore fully the subject of your search. So we started from scratch—with a fresh approach, an entirely new architecture and breakthrough algorithms.

Our approach is to focus on the content of a page and then present a set of results that has both depth and breadth. Our aim is to give you a wider range of more detailed results and the opportunity to explore more fully the different ideas behind your search.We think this approach is more useful to you than a simple list.

I’ll have to play around a bit more to see how cuil comes up with various serps. More later

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Check out PBHS’ lens on Squidoo, PBHS on YouTube and the PBHS blog.

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Proven results. Experience. Understanding. Outstanding design. Peer reviewed content.
We are experts in the custom design of websites that differentiate your practice and build a strong brand — as we have for thousands of respected dental and medical professionals from Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons, Orthodontists, Endodontists and Periodontists
to Cosmetic Dentists and Plastic Surgeons.

We will start by designing your site as an educational resource and
electronic billboard for your practice — an online brochure directed at
the large number of patients and referring doctors who use the Internet.
We’ll tell them why they should trust you with their care and what
makes you special.

With our staff of experienced graphic designers, software specialists
and copywriters, we will make certain that your site has a first-class,
highly professional image.

Contact PBHS Website Design 1 800.840.5383

www.pbhs.com

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Secondly is the standard of website design. We are pushing boundaries every day to meet the expectations of our dental clients. Although we make custom designs for our clients our dental website templates are state of the art as well. Just read one of our client’s testimonial!

I’m glad I’m working with another great company after I left Best Image (a company I would recommend if you’re working in the real estate industry). If you happen to be a dentist, plastic surgeon or any profession related to the dental health industry I encourage you to look at PBHS’ website design services!

FYI: We’re about to launch version PBHS 2.0 pretty soon! I’ll keep you posted!

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They are just getting started on their first step towards creating an entirely new way to search the Web. The quality of their results will vary as they make Searchme better and better.

Watch the demo here: searchme.com

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Nowadays the resources for SEO are almost endless. There are several free tools available which can help you with your SEO. Besides of these free tools there are tons of good forums and these communities are open to help you with almost any question (be polite!).

Aren’t you afraid you will be out of a job with this kind of advice?

Good one. Short and simple: No. Why? Because there will always be website owners who don’t want to do it themselves. Their expertise isn’t optimization and they don’t feel confident enough to do the job. There is more to it then having the ‘manual’. You need to have basic knowledge of HTML.

You also need to know how to use a ftp-client to get your files up to your server. Let’s not forget you need to have time as well. SEO can be time consuming. You need to do a lot of research: keywords, link building, competition, etc. Optimizing your site can’t be done in a weekend unlike replacing a side mirror of a Ford Focus.

So where do I start?

Like I mentioned before there are a lot of communities and websites that can get you started. First I will mention some ‘must read’ websites:

• SEOmoz - Rank Better

• Search Engine Land

• SEO Book.com

You might think the list is short but these sites are packed with useful information. SEOmoz just reached the 2000 mark for premium members (congrats Rand!) and this website will give weeks (if not months) of valuable reading material. So do the other two I mentioned. I suggest you get yourself a good RSS-reader (Mac, Win, Linux/Unix) and start subscribing to the above feeds. Make sure you subscribe to eightdegree’s rss feed as well!

What about the SEO tools?

A good start is using SoloSEO. SoloSEO is a do-it-yourself SEO Project Management system. It does a great job of keeping things simple and we all know we want things to be simple and easy! SoloSEO will all of your tasks in one place: keyword management, link building, content tracking, etc. It will provide you with all the necessary tools and keep it all organized.

Pricing is pretty decent (5 domains for $29.00 a month) and it will save you time! You can find other free tools scattered online and you might end up populating your own spread sheets. Don’t you rather take your dog for a beach walk? I know I want to!

I still think you’re a fool by sharing this knowledge…

You’re entitled to think so but I strongly believe in sharing information. Without sharing there wouldn’t be the internet! Sharing knowledge and information will eventually make us all grow. It’s not about you as an individual. I can go on in detail about my views of the world and human mankind but if you’re interested in my opinions I recommend reading my personal blog mindplunge.

Happy Optimizing!

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Here are some results:

Search term: “web design Santa Rosa, CA”
Google: page 2 - #3
Yahoo!: page 1 - #4
Live Search: page 1 - #9
Ask.com: not listed on the first 10 pages

Search term: “webdesign Santa Rosa, CA” (mind the misspelling)
Google: page 1 - #6
Yahoo!: page 1 - #2
Live Search: page 1 - #9
Ask.com: page 1 - #1

Search term: “SEO Santa Rosa Ca”
Google: page 1 - #1
Yahoo!: page 1 - #1
Live Search: page 1 - #1
Ask.com: not listed on the first 10 pages

As you can see some pretty amazing improvement for eightdegree within two weeks.

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Like I said eightdegree (ED) can’t be found. Search terms like: “web design, Santa Rosa CA” comes up with zilch for ED. We are going to change this! The next coming weeks I will keep you informed about the status of this project. Expect stats, graphs and how I managed to get a higher ranking.

This week I will focus on the on-page optimization: On-Page factors are related directly to the content and structure of the website. This normally consists of pages written in the HyperText Markup Language but also applies to other document formats that are indexed by search engines, for example Microsoft Word or PDF formats. On-page optimization involves modifying keyword frequency in the URL, Title, Headings, Hypertext Links and Body text. It may also involve reducing redundant HTML codes (aka cruft) produced by Web page authoring tools and restructuring the site to produce better linked and focussed page content.

I’ll keep you posted!

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