When running a website, its extremely important to maintain a large amount of optimized content on your site. If you offer a large number of PDF files on your site, that content is being read, but it isn’t providing you the same amount of benefit as a well formatted HTML page. Getting a PDF file search engine optimized is yet another way that you can take advantage of content you already have on your site to bring higher page rank. Setting this up simply requires a little bit of editing.

First, when creating a document you will turn into a pdf, you should include the heading tags you would usually use on your website. This is because this data will be carried over, giving these phrases and sentences preference and helping to saturate your keywords. Once you have the content created, assemble the rest of the PDF and export it. You can now edit the metadata within the file using Adobe Acrobat.

Acrobat actually stores metadata in two differen places, so it is important to use both. Within the software, you should enter pertinent seo data in the Document Metadata menu, as well as the Document Properties section. Both of these areas include the basic fields, an HTML title, a field for author, subject, and keywords. It is important to include data in both, but you should avoid using the same information, as duplicate content is often penalized by search engines. The document metadata section includes a number of additional fields that are less important due to the fact that they are not looked at by search engines. So, once you have your PDF equipped with the important keywords, a keyword in its title, and a good description, youre ready to save it and upload it to your site. Optimizing everything may seem like a lot of work, but pagerank is key to becoming successful, and every little bit helps.

Posted by Ian Logsdon.
Did you enjoy this article? If so, then subscribe to my RSS feed.
There are more resources available at our On-line Webmaster Resource Center.

When running a web site, it is important to realize that malware can ruin a site’s reputation, harm your long time and new customers, and generally make your site a problem. Because of this, a number of major web service providers have jumped on the bandwagon of providing services for webmasters that want to ensure their site is free of malware, and clean it up if any malicious code is found. Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft all have entries in this market with different capabilities.

Yahoo!’s offering is known as SearchScan, and it provides anyone making a search on yahoo.com with warnings about sites. This is an extension of McAfee’s SiteAdvisor system, allowing Yahoo! to detect malware while spydering a site. There are 3 different classification for sites, Browser Exploints, which result in a site being banned from the search engine, Dangerous Downloads, ranging from viruses to trojans, and Unsolicted email, where sites scanned are known to practice spamming. If your site appears with either of the two later warnings, and if it is banned from Yahoo! do to browser exploits, you need to do a full scan of your site for malware, because otherwise you will risk losing a great deal of traffic. The service does not provide any corrective tools of its own.

Google provides users with a similar service, Safe Browsing Diagnostic. To use this tool, simply check your URL in the following format: http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://yoururl.com. This allows you to get a report on your site, whether it is suspicious, how recently it was flagged, and when the last malicious code was seen. This provides you with the opportunity to learn more about what could have flagged Google, providing you with more details than the Yahoo! system. The software also knows whether you have simply executed malicious code or whether you hosted malware, allowing you to know whether a user uploaded a virus or you hosted one by accident. These details are useful because they tell you whether your site is currently a risk to browsers, whether you should put tighter controls on how users interact with your site, etc. Unfortunately the system doesn’t give you any more detail, so if you want to remove infected files, you will need a standalone, server class anti virus application.

Finally, the most recent addition to this field has been Microsoft’s Live Search webmaster tool. This application provides you with the ability to search URLs for malware and links to malware. This is important because it means it will detect if somewhere you send your customers to contains viruses. This additonal layer of security is extremely useful, and its couple with a detailed reporting system, letting you know what pages contain malicious code and download these reports to your computer. While this system is perhaps the most detailed, they do not integrate it with the actual Live Search service, and as such this means you will not be flagged for having such content. And, while the report may tell you what files are infected, only antivirus software can reliably purge malicious code from your site.

In the end, it is a combination of these search engines that will reap you the greatest benefit while looking into the security and safety of data and visitors on your site. By using all three options, you will have a good idea what is wrong, where it is located, and that will help you determine what tool you use to solve the problem. Diligence in protecting your customers is important because if you get a reputation for being dangerous, you will drive away site visitors quickly.

Posted by Ian Logsdon.
Did you enjoy this article? If so, then subscribe to my RSS feed.
There are more resources available at our On-line Webmaster Resource Center.

Advertising is essential to building an effective and profitable website. If you aren’t selling something, you’ll need to have ads, its one of the few ways to monetize a site. Developing your website’s advertising is a complicated process, because there are a number of ways to advertise on your site, from affiliate programs to Google and Microsoft’s advertising. Choosing and configuring your advertising are both difficult choices, but this article is more about how you can integrate ads into your site without causing distraction. It will take some revisions to get your advertising down pat, so don’t be worried if it takes some practice before your advertising starts to pay off.

The first choice you should make is the amount of advertising you would like to use. It is important to maintain a large amount of content per ad, as your customers are unlikely to want to read through a large amount of advertising. How much is, of course, dependant on how you advertise. For text ads, you can use ads both on the sidebar of your site, the bottom of your site, and within the content of your article. If you use ads both on the side and bottom, you can use a minimal amount within the text of your page itself. As a rule, try to stick to about 20% of a page’s content being ads, this prevents your readers from being overwhelmed.

Using affiliate programs allows you to forward users to purchases they might want to make. Often these come with some sort of syndicated ad, and give you the opportunity to write a review. This means you can have both content and ad revenue generated by such a page. This strategy is also useful for combining different advertising strategies on your site. You can use text ads as well as an affiliate ad on a specific page.

Varying the ads you offer is also important, because if your site is full of identical advertising you will not benefit by spreading advertising around. By using multiple dfferent ads, even through the same service, you will be much more likely to build a more effective advertising system. Along with this, you must make the choice between text based and image based advertising. This decision really has to do with where the ads will be placed. In line advertising is more effective if the ad is text based, but sidebar and footer ads are often better when they are a graphic. Of course, a clever webmaster will find a way to use both on their site. It is not adviseable, however, to use flash based ads that will distract from your sites content.

Finding the right location for your ads is essential, so try different strategies for advertising. Pop-up ads should be avoided, because the spread of pop-up blockers, and the fact that many visitors are offended by pop-up ads. As you try out different ads and services, keep track of what approaches make you money and what works most effectively. As your advertising develops, you will have the capacity to build an excellent revenue system.

Posted by Ian Logsdon.
Did you enjoy this article? If so, then subscribe to my RSS feed.
There are more resources available at our On-line Webmaster Resource Center.

Over the course of the next year, ICANN, the board responsible for determining how the internet grows, is going to be introducing a broad variety of new domain name extensions, giving access to new top level domains beyond the common .com, .net, .org, etc. While previous expansions have occured, the new changes are guaranteed to offer an exceedingly large number of domains that previously were not on the market. While at first this seems like a gift to domain name squatters, looking to make money off big companies that want to protect their brand name. This isn’t guaranteed however, and with the sheer number of domains becoming available, it seems almost impossible that there will be any future in domain name squatting.

Domain squatting has become a serious problem, it reared its head recently when President Bush’s library had to re-purchase its domain after failing to renew it. The legal issues at hand are complicated, because while part of the issue is certainly related to intellectual property and trademark protection, thats only half the problem. Companies are not diligent about renewing their domains, and if one expires, it really is their own fault. Either way, the fear, as it relates to these new domains, is that companies will now have to secure dozens, even hundreds of domains in order to protect themselves from sites that use their name and a different extension. This is based on the current model for web traffic, one which is already almost gone. The fact is, while people still type in some domains, search engines are a dominant force in traffic. Because Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! have a vested interest in taking you to legitimate sites, they will be sure to deliver the correct results, rather than squatted sites.

Of course, some large companies will take the initiative to prevent this, but if you are a smaller site, you will have to think of your domain as less important than your name. Indeed, the ability to create new domains actually allows for more companies to choose a site name that is close to their company name. This expansion might actually be good for intellectual property because sites won’t have to invest a great deal of effort in finding a domain they like, they’ll be able to use one of the many new extensions made available to them by the ICANN decision.

This really is the only acceptable path forward for the internet, as the number of available domains has shrunk and the internet has simply grown too large for straight domain browsing to be the dominant source of traffic. In the long run, with the number of sites growing at the rate it has, there will be no reason to worry about a site on a parallel domain, as their traffic will come in from their keywords, not yours, and will therefore be based on that sites individual search engine performance. This decision is good news for everyone and should help provide room for growth and innovation going forward.

Posted by Ian Logsdon.
Did you enjoy this article? If so, then subscribe to my RSS feed.
There are more resources available at our On-line Webmaster Resource Center.