Search Engine Optimization: November 2014

Sunday, 16 November 2014

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Search Engine Land’s SEO Library

More SEO Guides & Books

Another excellent guide is Google’s “Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.” This is a free PDF download that covers basic tips that Google provides to its own employees on how to get listed. You’ll find it here. Also well worth checking out is Moz’s “Beginner’s Guide To SEO,” which you’ll find here, and the SEO Success Pyramid from Small Business Search Marketing.
Daily SEO News & Expert SEO Advice

In addition to daily news stories from our editorial staff, Search Engine Land publishes daily articles from expert contributors that cover SEO issues mainly from an in-the-trenches perspective. Browse the SEO Channel for the most recent SEO news stories and expert columns, or sign up to receive all of our SEO related content via email.
Search Engine Land’s SEO Library

The SEO Library is an area within Search Engine Land that provides a collection of all stories we’ve written on the topic of SEO. We also have sub-categories, including:
SEO: Blocking Spiders
SEO: Blogs & Feeds
SEO: Cloaking & Doorway Pages
SEO: Domain Names & URLs
SEO: Duplicate Content
SEO: Flash
SEO: General
SEO: Image Search
SEO: Local
SEO: Mobile Search
SEO: Redirects & Moving Sites
SEO: Spamming
SEO: Submitting & Sitemaps
SEO: Tagging
SEO: Titles & Descriptions
SEO: Video Search
SEO: Writing & Body Copy

Also see our related Link Building category and these sub-categories:
Link Building: Link Bombs
Link Building: Linkbait
Link Building: Paid Links

In addition to covering SEO generally, Search Engine Land also has search engine optimization areas specifically for each of the major search engines:
Google SEO
Bing SEO
Yahoo SEO

Also within our library is the How To: SEO section, which is devoted to practical tips and tactics about search engine optimization.

Links to the entire guide are shown below (start at the beginning, and each page will take you to the next):

*The Free SEO Training ebook was last updated in APRIL 2013.

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“the Best SEO Guide I think I’ve ever seen… simple to the point, no fluff”.

Our free search engine optimisation training guide has just been updated in 2013, and is available free to download now to all email subscribers. Some of it’s fact. Some of it’s tips some of it is strategy, some of it is tactics. A lot of it is theory. There’s over 20,000 people subscribed by email, and you can see what people think of the Hobo SEO blog & newsletter here: comments confirm I don’t really use this to sell seo services. This blog and seo basics newsletter is all about Google seo & web stuff you can use on your own site, or I don’t put it in.

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The Hobo SEO Starter Guide for beginners offers advice on mainly on-page and on-site SEO basics including creating unique, accurate page titles, proper use of the “description” meta tag, improvements to site structure, improvements to the structure of your URLs, improvements to navigation arrays, optimising page text and visual content, improving quality of content and services, writing better anchor text, optimising images properly, using heading tags appropriately, making effective use of robots.txt and using rel=”nofollow” for links when appropriate, for starters.

Warranties

There’s no warranties – it’s opinion and theory, not advice. Take it or leave it. I hope you find it useful. It’s a seo guide aimed at beginners – hopefully everybody can get something out of it or the links to other resources it points out.

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FREE SEO Training EBook (2013)

Last Updated: February 10th, 2014
| By Shaun Anderson

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Hobo is one of the most popular SEO training websites in the UK, with over 85,000 (*Jan 2014) visitors coming every month to learn how to SEO their own sites, or to hire seo services. Our free guide to SEO, and many of our posts about seo, have been mentioned on the top media sites in the industry, including US based sites Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Journal. We offer SEO Training and consultation to companies all over the UK, including sharing our detailed technical seo report on your site. We can (in person, or remotely) teach you or your employees how to seo your corporate site, and provide a cost effective seo consultation service to keep track of your progress. Our in-house seo training service includes advice on on-page optimisation, information architecture, keyword research, link building, copywriting, press releases and web analytics to help you get the most of your website. We use YOUR website(s) at the centre of all our training workshops, with EXACT advice on what to do to improve traffic and sales from Google. Based in Greenock, just 25 miles from Glasgow, in Scotland, we are well within easy reach of Glasgow and Edinburgh. I’ve spoken at business conferences and training workshops on the subject of search engine optimisation in both cities, since 2008.

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We are happy to present this FREE search engine optimization guide for beginner and intermediate webmasters. Following these SEO lessons you can build your own successful website that can attract search engine traffic even if you are starting from zero. The ultimate goal of this guide is to help your raise your website's search engine ranking on Google, Yahoo and MSN safely for your own target keywords.

SEO is not hard and it’s definitely not an elite skill to be only mastered by the “gurus of internet marketing”. In the field of SEO, anyone can claim to become a “guru” overnight and unfortunately a lot of people get duped into the search engine marketing hype or the latest SEO trick. This guide will clear the air and put you on a foundation of SEO knowledge you can build upon. With the right information at your fingertips there is no limit to making your website rankings soar.

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Take a peak inside the detailed table of contents.

Read our 12 step SEO guide online. No registration required. Download our 12 step SEO guide in PDF file format (Download the Adobe Acrobat Reader). Email registration is required.

What You Will Find in This SEO Manual

12 clearly explained steps in plain English on how to gain solid ranking on Google, Yahoo and Bing in 2013.
10 site preparation tips you must follow to get your site indexed and improve page inclusion.
How to get into minds of the search engine engineers and exploit the top 10 ranking sites for gaining higher ranking.
The top 15 On-Page optimization techniques you must implement on your site.
16 detailed link popularity factors you must execute in your link-building campaign.
5 real life examples of the best optimized sites you can copy today.
How to ethically boost your search rankings with a simple change on your web page by up to 300%
How to easily identify the “best” and “worst” neighborhoods for inbound links in 15 seconds or less.
12 Directory and article submission pitfalls exposed.
How to dig deep into your site visitors' behavior on your site and make incremental conversion and usability improvements.
How to turn the blogosphere world and viral marketing to your advantage using Twitter, Youtube and Facebook.

SEO for PDF Summary

That's it for optimizing PDF Document Properties. This article discusses just one aspect of SEO for PDFs. The actual document itself can also be optimized for search. Use PDFs to your advantage. Think about taking larger multi-page PDFs and breaking them down to their least common denominator then offer them up as a group of PDFs from within an HTML Document that is well formed and semantically structured.

Review the first page of your PDF Document and make sure that it best represents the content of your PDF. In many instances, this may be a Table of Contents which usually isn't the most optimal page to have as the first page, not from a search perspective. That is why using the Document Properties to their full extent is imperative when Optimizing PDFs for Search.

If you can, I'd suggest making an introduction page for the PDF that contains a Heading and an Abstract of the document. Use an Inverted Pyramid Writing approach when constructing the Abstract and I typically suggest a target of 140 to 160 characters per paragraph

Just The Basics

The above covers just the basics of PDF Document Optimization for Search. Once you start to optimize PDFs on a regular basis, you find out how important they can be in the overall equation.

There are a variety of strategies that can be utilized when working with a library of PDF Documents, the above is first and foremost with ALL documents, not just PDFs. This applies to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and/or any publishing software.

While we're in the Document Properties dialog, we might as well optimize the document for our visitors viewing pleasure.
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PDF Document Properties - Initial View

These are the default settings for the Document's Initial View, what the visitor sees when they open the PDF from a link. In many instances, this is really not the best setting as the user ends up with a document that is not optimized for viewing.

PDF Document Properties - Description

The Description Tab is where most of your search optimized content resides.

File: quality-rater-guidelines-2007.pdf

File = <title> - If a Title is not present (see next), the file name is used by default. This is why it is imperative that your file names are relevant (suggest hyphens as keyword separator) and that you've crafted an optimized document title.
Title: Guidelines for Quality Raters

Title = <title> - This is the single most important element of your PDF Document Properties. This is used as the title in the SERPs. Remember, if this is not populated, the file name e.g. quality-rater-guidelines-2007.pdf is used by default.
Author: Google

This can be a company name or an individual's name.
Subject: General Guidelines for Quality Raters: how to evaluate web pages and search results (2007)

Subject = Snippet - The Subject serves as the META Description for your PDF Document. It is the second most important element after the Title.
Keywords: google, quality raters, evaluation process, web spam

The Keywords dialog is here for a reason, use it effectively. I keep them brief, usually 3-5 primary keywords, no fluff.

Write-protect your document

If you don’t write-protect your document, then someone can upload the whole file to their site and change it however they want (including editing out your links.)

—-TL;DR—-

Ok, ok. Look, PDF SEO ain’t too hard. Just follow this checklist:
Always use text-based PDFs
Set your title in the document properties
Set an SEO-friendly URL/filename
Do good SEO
Keep the file size light
Avoid duplicate content
Set the other document properties too
Touchup the Reading Order
Don’t save as the latest Acrobat version
Write-protect your document

Let me know in the comments if I missed in any PDF SEO FAQs.

–TTFN.

Do good SEO

What do keyword-rich title tags and descriptive URLs have in common, besides being PDF SEO best practices? They also follow standard SEO best practices. Follow your other usual basic SEO best practices to optimize your PDFs as well. This includes:
internal linking to the PDF page to give it some link juice and authority (I see high-potential PDFs unnecessarily buried too deep in many websites). Speaking of internal linking and common pitfalls, please link from your PDF page to your other pages when relevant. It helps your SEO efforts and the user experience, and it isn’t done enough (seriously, I cringe when I have to copy and paste a URL from a PDF into the browser).
good keyword selection
keywords in body copy
image optimization (note: you can set alt text in many PDF tools)
human optimizing (Good content is good SEO, friend)
Keep the file size light

Huge sized files will load slower, affecting user experience and the search engines’ crawl. Adobe has the “PDF Optimizer” function which will allow you to reduce file size, and you’ll want to use it for heavy PDFs. Learn the nitty-gritty on reducing PDF file size here.
Avoid duplicate content

Having both HTML and PDF versions of the same content can sometimes be a wise choice, but only if you take measures to prevent the duplicate content issue. Also, if you tweak a PDF and re-upload it, don’t create a duplicate by accidentally changing the filename and change the URL.
Set the other document properties too

Hey, while you’re in there(setting the title)… you might as well complete the other properties such as Author, Subject, and Keywords. I couldn’t honestly tell you I know how much impact this will have, but I keep reading on the Internets that it’s worth it. So fill out all the properties you can — I just wouldn’t spend all day on it. Some sources say the Subject will become the Meta Description (but I have yet to verify this with much validity.)
Touchup the Reading Order

“Touchup” the Reading Order and set alternate text as well as headings. The headings are said to be handled by the search engines similarly to how header tags are handling in plain HTML.
Don’t save as the latest Acrobat version

Many readers might not have the latest Reader version (and no one wants to upload it just for your stupid page). Search engines sometimes fall behind the times too, so save your PDF in an older version.

Set your title in the document properties

This is such a common and easy-to-fix error that it drives me crazy. It’s common knowledge that the title tag is a huge ranking factor. To do this to a PDF, one must set the title in the document properties. Almost all PDF creators support this functionality including Adobe applications such as InDesign. Per usual, you want to smartly utilize keywords and optimize your title tags.
Set an SEO-friendly URL/filename

Typically, the PDF filename will become part of the URL, so give your document a good key-word rich filename. Often, search engines use the filename/URL snippet for the title tag when the title is not set. Also, some document creators will default the title as the filename. So please set a descriptive title and filename. I’m sick of search results that look like this:

The Best Practices in SEO for PDF Files

The big myth that search engines can’t digest PDF content used to be the case years ago, but the search engines have come a long way, baby. So if you have reason to stick with your PDFs, just follow the simple tips below. I’ve listed the important stuff first.
Always use text-based PDFs

Search engines understand text waaay better than images (though the engines do have rudimentary optical character recognition capabilities), so make sure the words in your PDF are basic copy-and-paste-able text, not pictures of words. Most of the big PDF creators, like those in Adobe Creative Suite, have your back here. If you happen to have a scanned document you want to turn into a solid SEO landing page, you’ll need to use a little OCR yourself and convert the document into text.

Why Use PDFs then?

Don’t get me wrong twice — there’s still reasons to keep PDFs as SEO landing pages. Below are a few common use cases:
When you already have many PDF pages on your site that people consider valuable. Before replacing PDFs, be sure to check to see if your PDFs have backlinks decent engagement metrics, and good traffic.
When you have really sexy PDF’s that would be difficult to turn into an equivalently sexy and user-friendly HTML.
When you have content that is meant to be printed or downloaded, like spec sheets, MSDSs, product manuals, brochures, forms meant to be printed and filled by hand, etc…
When the cost-benefit ratio just isn’t in favor of replacing PDFs. This might be the case if you only have a few PDFs and you don’t want to spend the upfront time or money converting the pages into HTML and redirecting the URLs. (That said, a good PDF-to-HTML converter may be worth the investment if you’ve got a lot of un-uploaded PDFs laying around.)

SEO for PDFs

Posted on January 10, 2013 by Reid Bandremer
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As my partner in crime Travis recently pointed out, misconceptions abound in the SEO industry. Here’s another misconception: “PDF pages are so SEO-unfriendly that you can’t rank for any halfway competitive keywords with them“.

Some SEOs are still so set against the Portable Document Format pages that they don’t feel they should even be landing pages. Some such SEOs recommend replacing all PDFs with HTML pages or building additional HTML landing pages targeting the same keywords as the PDFs.

The truth is: the biggest reason PDF pages often rank so horribly is that they are rarely properly optimized.

Don’t get me wrong. In an overall SEO showdown, I’d still pick HTML over PDFs any day of the week, and you’re not likely to catch me creating brand new web content for my clients in Adobe Acrobat. The real reason HTML is SEO-superior in 2013 is the user-experience. Most people are more comfortable with HTML and experience less freezing and slow loading with HTML. It’s easier to incorporate interactivity and social functionality into HTML pages. People also link to HTML pages and share them more frequently than PDFs(this is big).