Although most experts would recommend placing content on the web in html form, PDFs still play a vital role, especially in B2B marketing. Research (and our own experience as a B2B marketing firm) has sown that some of the content most sought by business purchasers are case studies, whitepapers, and technical articles—and PDFs are a great vehicle for these content-heavy B2B marketing pieces. Business purchasers specifically looking for this type of information can narrow their search to look exclusively for PDFs using the advance search options of search engines like Google and Yahoo.

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

You sure can! Surprised by this answer? Let me explain. You own a Ford Focus (yes, the car) and you need to replace the side mirror. Ask yourself this question: Can I remove it myself without taking it into a car repair shop? Same answer as your first question! A search on Google can bring you to this link.

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!

It’s been only 10 days and already we can see some significant changes to our SERP’s (Search Engine Result Page). Eightdegree was ‘lost’ 2 weeks ago (google: page 22 - #7) for “web design Santa Rosa, CA” and “SEO Santa Rosa, CA”. Some minor changes got us a long way. We optimized the home page by changing the content a bit. A better implementation of the H1, H2 tags, and most important we changed the title tag.

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.

What better of a showcase then your own website! I finally have some time to optimize eightdegree.com for the search engines. As of today my website can’t be found and I’m one of the thousands web designers here in the Sonoma county area. I’m pretty successful getting clients ‘up’ in the Search Engines and now I’m using eightdegree as a showcase to what is possible.

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!