B2B SEO

Recently, there was an article on MarketingSherpa (membership required) in which Martin Edic set forth 10 tips for optimizing PDFs for search. While access to the article requires membership, there was a posting on SearchNewz by Navneet Kaushal that summarized the ten tips presented, and the author appears to have posted a screenshot of the full article here.

While the tips mentioned in the MarketingSherpa article are mostly accurate (there are some inaccuracies regarding duplicate content, and stuffing meta keywords has been irrelevant for years), the article clearly missed some crucial factors in terms of optimizing pdfs for search. Among other things, the article failed to mention tagging content, specifying the reading order of PDFs, and how to influence meta descriptions.

Sure, it’s great if you can get PDFs indexed and perhaps rank well, but if you don’t know how to specify the reading order and influence meta descriptions, there’s little likelihood that anyone is every going to click on the PDF in the search results. If that’s the case, what good is a high-ranking PDF?

For a much more in-depth and illustrated article, read What you don’t know about optimizing PDFs can hurt you. It’s a substantial article that contains 17 tips regarding how to optimize PDFs and several screen captures to help you understand the issues.

I wrote about how B2B marketers can influence geo-specific search in a recent Search Engine Land article. Although Local search results are generally not as important for many B2B marketers as they are for a retail enterprise, some B2B companies serve a defined market and can benefit greatly from Local search.

In the recent months, there have been several changes in the Local search results. In January, Google started displaying 10 Local results instead of three, and it started embedding its Local search results into web search results (see Blended Search: Implications for B2B Search Marketing.) Yahoo has made changes as well. Recently, Matt McGee posted a great interview he had with Yahoo’s Brian Gil regarding Local search on Yahoo. Check it out.

A few weeks ago, there was a lively exchange on Search Engine Land about using the “nofollow” link attribute to sculpt PageRank. Shari Thurow, in her article You’d Be Wise To “NoFollow” This Dubious SEO Advice, essentially railed on SEO practitioners for employing this practice, which respected expert Stephan Spencer describes and advocates in his article Sculpting Your PageRank For Maximum SEO Impact.

If you do not believe that a page’s content is important, then don’t link to it. Better yet, remove the content. If you believe a web page’s content is important, then link to it and do it in a way that makes sense to your end users, your site’s visitors. I think it is very odd to put a nofollow attribute on pages within your own site. Essentially, you are saying that you cannot validate your own content…you advocate giving users one information architecture and search engines a different one?

Shari’s comments regarding the use of nofollow seem to imply some sort of bait and switch tactic that would not only fly in the face of search engines, but would be deceitful in some way to site visitors. So many people have cited Matt Cutts’ position that there is no problem with this practice that I won’t bother citing more. However, for those fearful of employing the practice, Matt indicated that employing such practice in no way even serves as a red flag to Google. Secondly, how could such a practice be deceitful in some way to site visitors? When the visitor is on the site, they have no idea which links have the nofollow attribute; they can go anywhere the navigation allows.

While it would be great if every page had the same high value to search engines and site visitors alike, that’s simply not reality for the vast majority of sites—even if it has been optimized for human usability. There are many pages that have real value to site visitors but marginal value to site owners in terms of PageRank or being included in search engine indices.

So what links should you nofollow? (more…)

In the pursuit of boosting traffic, B2B marketers often search for the most popular keywords, those that will drive a large number of visitors to the site. In doing so, one often fails to recognize (and optimize) obscure, high-value keywords that can lead to a long-lasting stream of ongoing business from customers. Many of these keywords may not be available for PPC, due to their low search volume. However, they potentially represent millions of dollars to be captured via B2B search engine optimization. (more…)