www.rochester-seo.com/articles/page-title-optimization.html

…then you can bet that a search engine will be able to figure it out, too. Search engines are just dumb humans. Here is a tip: Write your file and directory names like you were organizing a book. For example, if you were writing a online book about insects (and spiders, in particular), a good, human readable URL might look like this:

www.InsectWorld.com/spiders/spiderfood.html

A URL that looks like this:

InsectWorld.com/page.asp?cat_id=23&page=15 is bad. Very bad. Crazy bad.

See where I’m going here? If you can read it, so can a search engine.

BTW, don’t over do it. (e.g. don’t make them too long). You should be able to tell a friend what the URL is (out loud, using your own voice) without sounding like a complete idiot.

SEO is simple. Just give people the information they are looking for (when they are looking for it), and the search engines will richly reward you with a top-ten listing that includes your site (preferably above-the-fold, and before your competitors’ listing).

Okay, it’s not that simple.

But it is important to understand that good SEO is not about “tricking” the search engines into listing your site without proper merit. There’s no black magic or secret voodoo involved here. Search engines are all about “relevancy”. That’s how they make money and that’s how they keep people coming back again and again to use their services (so that they can make more money, so more people will continue to use their services, so they can make more money, so…). Okay, you get the picture. Besides, search engine are changing their algorithms all the time. Algos (as they are called) are heavily guarded secrets. “Tricks” today, won’t work tomorrow (and worse, they could damage your current rankings and reputation). Don’t rely on short-term gains by trying to cheat the system. You will lose in the end. Google and their search engineers are smarter than you, way smarter. The easiest way to win, is to play by their rules…you  just have to know the rules in order to win, that’s all!

It’s not in the best interest of a search engine to be easily manipulated. If they deliver crappy results, a user will go somewhere else. Google, for example, has billions and billions of dollars at stake here. That’s why they are such a hard nut to crack (as far as being manipulated goes), and that is exactly why they are the world’s most popular search engine. There is a very good reason why Google stock is trading at $529.06 (as of 04/27/10). They simply deliver the best results (in both natural organic and paid PPC), so people keep coming back for more and more. Other search engines (and I won’t name any names), are more easily manipulated, and so people trust them less (and their stock is trading at $16-$30/share, for perspective).

It’s the search engine’s job to get “into the head” of the searcher in order to deliver the best and most relevant results, based on their query. And that’s your job, too. Start thinking about how your customers think. What kinds of questions can you answer for them? Which of their problems can you solve? Provide your real life customers with this information and the search engines spiders and BOTS will discover it. And once the BOTS discover that relevant content, the algorithm will start delivering those answers (e.g. your website pages) to them. Simple, right?

This article is #1 in a series about Search Engine Optimization. The next article will teach you about how search engines work. Special thanks to Katharine at Marketing by Kat for kicking my ass into blogging again.

The point here is; take full advantage of these user “perceptions” to build brand equity with organic search. With a full 90% of users clicking a link within the first three pages of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), how can you afford not to?

One of my clients is a distributor of high-end test and measurement equipment and they have thousands of manufacturer-supplied PDF assets linked from their product detail pages. With just a little bit of optimization, I was able to get these PDF documents ranked right up there with the regular HTML pages in the search engine results pages (SERPS).

There are several advantages to optimizing your PDFs. First, if you can get BOTH your main page and the accompanying PDF ranked on the search engine results page (not hard to do), you will own 2 positions out of the possible 10 that are available. This means that one of your competitors has just been bumped to the next page. Second, if your PDF is focused on a particular item or product, you can put a hyperlink in the PDF that takes the user directly to the relevant HTML page on your Web site. You can even put a “Buy Now” or “Add To Cart” button graphic in the PDF that points the user directly to your shopping cart for immediate checkout. Thirdly, by optimizing the document properties, you
can control what the title and description looks like on the SERP. Without META data, the search engine will take a best guess approach and decide on its own what the description snippet will look like (and
they usually look terrible). If you are able to control your own marketing messages, your link will more likely to be clicked!

PDF Optimization tips:

1. Spend the money and purchase Adobe’s Professional version of Acrobat (you will easily recover the cost with increased revenue). The professional version allows users to add ‘metadata’ that includes the
   title, the description and the keywords that will describe the PDF document to the search engines. But more importantly, it will allow you to place graphics (‘buy now’ buttons) and to create hyperlinks that
   will redirect users to the appropriate locations on your Web site (e.g. your checkout page or lead generation contact page.).
2. First, the PDF needs to be saved in such a way that the text is readable. If you simply scan your document with a flatbed scanner, no indexable content is saved; it becomes merely an image of text and not real search engine readable text. Even though you can still optimize the META data for a PDF that contains a scanned image, it is better if you use Adobe’s distiller from the native application that the PDF was created in. This way all of the keywords contained in the document become accessible to the engines.
3. If the original document was created in Microsoft Word (or similar word processing program), use proper styles from the application’s “Styles Palette” rather than decorating your copy with the “Formatting Palette”. This “semantic” formatting will tell search engines which keywords are more important and allow them to learn more about your document. For example, make the headlines in your PDFs Headline 1, Headline 2, etc. and control the font size and colors (the decoration)
   by modifying the style itself.
4. Break up large ‘catalog’ type PDFs into smaller individual, tightly themed PDFs. Not only will this decrease the download time for the end user, but it will give you the opportunity to rank each document on it’s own for a particular set of keywords.
5. Optimize the copy just like you would optimize a regular web page, placing your coveted keyword in all the right places. (Headlines, Subheads, paragraph copy, bulleted lists, etc.)
6. Be careful of duplicate content issues. If your PDF contains exactly the same content as your HTML page, you are better off just using the HTML version and creating a printer-friendly CSS file for
   printing hard copies. If there is a business reason for having both versions available (e.g. a product page with an accompanying manufacturer-supplied PDF), then use your robots.txt file to keep the
   PDF out of the search engine’s index. Alternatively, you can make the content in both versions different enough as to not be flagged as duplicate content or worse, spam.
7. Add a footer to the PDF document that contains your company name and address. Many people use search queries that contain city names or state names if they are looking for local goods or services. Adding a footer to your PDF document is an easy way to ensure that these keywords are indexed.
8. Save it down a version. The latest greatest version of Acrobat Professional may ship with tons of new bells and whistles, but maybe the search engines haven’t caught up to that version yet, or maybe
   users don’t have the latest plugin or latest version of Acrobat Reader. This probably isn’t too much of an issue, but I like to save my PDFs so they can be opened in Adobe Reader 5.0 and later just to be on the safe side.
9. Make sure that the anchor text on your HTML page that points to the PDF contains relevant keywords so the search engine knows what the PDF is about. For example, don’t link to the PDF with anchor text that says, “Click here” or “Download the PDF”.