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.
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Search engine optimization is extremely important to the process of setting up a site or revisiting your website’s design. Indeed, it is true that most websites will not succeed without an appropriate plan to harness search engine optimization, short of getting lucky. This means that you need to consider SEO at all phases of development for your site. You need to focus on the most important aspects of search engine optimization: keyword usage, inbound links, unique content, etc. By building SEO into the design of your site, you can start reaping the benefits of your efforts as soon as your site is spidered.

If you’re building your site for the first time, there are a number of things you can do to benefit your search engine performance. First, decide whether you will be using one domain for your site. While it may cost more to host your site (or in this case sites) across multiple domains, you can reap substantial benefits by hosting a number of different websites, perhaps each serving a different function or selling a different product. One of the most reliable ways to receive good rankings on search engines is to have lots of inbound links. Having multiple domains where you host your sites means getting a head start on this process. As well, you can benefit greatly by using search engine optimization on your html filenames. By including your keywords in filenames, you can reap additional benefits from using them.

Choosing keywords is an important step in the process of developing your site, and this means you need to analyze the effectiveness of the keywords you have already chosen. Also, look at your competition; see what keywords they are using. Go after the weaker ones first, where you can get more rank, faster. By targeting keywords and using them heavily, you can start drawing traffic, this will allow you to build up your search engine rank gradually against larger sites.

The key to getting your site to take off is having a large amount of unique content. For this it is recommended you add a blog, resource center, or other area where you can keep a large amount of unique text. If you can provide expert commentary on a topic, any topic, you can garner inbound links that will provide you with a major boost. As well, posting your site to directories can garner you better search engine results, though it will likely require more inbound links than from sites with more content and less links.

In the end, search engine optimization allows you to improve the connectivity of your site. But without a way to monetize your site, a good product or a reliable advertising revenue scheme, your site will never be more than a hobby. Make sure you have a business plan and a good product, otherwise your work will be in vain.

Posted by Ian Logsdon.
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Getting readers to participate in your blog is an important part to growing it. If there is not an active discussion in your posts, your blog is probably not helping your site, because individuals aren’t getting enough out of the posts to participate. The best way to guarantee repeat traffic is to foster an environment of open discussion in your blog.

1. Address your readers:

Your writing is, after all, for them, so ask them to get involved, even if its just suggesting future topics or encouraging them to express an opinion on the topic. If you can target your readers needs and interests, you will get a lot more repeat traffic.

2. Respond to comments:

Comments aren’t a one way street, if you aren’t responding to your readers you are ignoring them. Every reasonable question and comment deserves a response, so stay engaged!

3. Offer benefits to users who participate:

You may even want to offer frequent visitors the opportunity to write for you, but at a minimum you want to reward your frequent visitors with something, whether its the ability to add a custom image to their comments or just keeping track of the total number of comments they have made.

4. Be nice:

Your readers are your customers, and by being harsh with them you will alienate them. Instead, you should always interact with readers in a friendly manor, after all, people are less likely to comment if they read rude responses.

5. Make sure commenting is easy:

Depending on your software, you may need to change it from its default settings. You should make it so as many people can comment as possible, generally even if they haven’t signed up with your site.

6. Review Products:

If you review products, you can ask readers to input their own experiences with the product. This will encourage readers to come back and read each others comments, and will help improve the quality of your reviews.

7. Write Controversial Posts:

Don’t be too offensive, but offending people a little bit is a great way to get them to post on your site. This will lead to arguments and discussion, which is all added content and traffic.

8. Poll Your Readers:

Introduce a daily or weekly poll question to encourage lurkers to participate. This will benefit you in other ways too, since a regular dialog improves your ability to provide for your readers’ needs.

9. Write a lot:

The more you write, the more there is to respond to. If you write daily, you’re off to a good start, but getting more comments means writing even more often. This likely means you need more than just one writer, so consider expanding.

10. Build a website around your blog:

Make your site more than just a blog. If you can create a community your readers will spend significantly more time on your site, so offer features outside of the blog itself to help network your readers and give them content they want.

Posted by Ian Logsdon.
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When starting search engine marketing there are a number of important things to focus on. But one of the most neglected elements of good SEO is choosing your keywords wisely. You can use all the right formatting, put your keywords in all the right places, and still suffer if your site doesn’t use the keywords that bring in traffic. If you are wondering what exactly qualifies as a keyword, it is any combination of one or more words, in a specific order, that describe your site. It is important that keywords be accurate, because all the traffic in the world won’t benefit your site if they aren’t looking for your content. Spam just wastes everyone’s time, and your bandwidth, so don’t bother.
So how do you choose keywords? You want terms that will receive a large number of queries on Google, Yahoo!, MSN and other popular search engines. If your terms aren’t being searched for, having your site index relatively high on search engine pages isn’t going to improve your traffic. Unfortunately the widespread usage of SEO has also crowded certain popular keywords, so you are looking for a keyword that is both popular and relatively unsaturated with established competitors. This can be difficult to find without help, so its important to know what tools you can use.
Google is a great resource for SEO in general, and as usual they have a tool that helps while brainstorming terms. All you have to do is input a search term and they will provide you with other popular search terms, allowing you to take one keyword and quickly expand to having several. As a rule it is good to have numerous keywords, since your customers will be coming to your site from different places and for different reasons. Make sure you are thinking of numerous different ways to describe your site, as customers will likely search with lots of different keywords.
Once you have keywords mapped out, you should also run them through a third party keyword tool. Some examples can be found here, here, and here. These usually give you traffic information about each keyword, allowing you to identify the most popular search terms, and therefore helping you choose which terms to emphasize. From here you should check the saturation of each keyword, do a Google search of the word and see how many responses you get, and more importantly, how many of them use the term specifically. Now you have to make a choice, you want to pick out a few keywords, 2-3, that will focus the most on. You might want to choose slightly less popular keywords if they are less saturated with content, because it means you will need to do less to make it to the top of those Google searches. Be careful, as unpopular search terms won’t likely bring in traffic. On the other had, if you cannot get on at least the first 3-5 pages of a search engine, you won’t benefit much either. Each decision is based entirely on the context of the keyword.
Now that you know how to get started, its time to find your keywords!

Posted by Ian Logsdon.
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