Alternative Discovery and SEO – Feeds, PDF's, and Blog SEO: PubCon Las Vegas Dec 2007, Day 2

Learn the best tips, tools, and techniques for non-traditional optimization for both indexing as well as ranking support. This includes files such as PDF's, doc's, PODCATS and RSS feeds.

Moderator:

• Joe Laratro

Speakers:

• Rick Klau, Strategic Partner Development, Google
• Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts
• George Aspland, Founder & President, eVision, LLC

First speaker is Rick Klau, Strategic Partner Development, Google. Some of the first points he makes are:

• His company does not index RSS/Atom content
• Social networks encourage feed distribution
• Feedburner's "pro" features are free of cost
• Includes TotalStats and MyBrand
• Sitemaps support feeds – RSS feeds work as a poorman's sitemap

Rick talks about the evolution of feed publishers. In 2004, blog and visuals overlap. Feeds today include all kinds of content.

Clickthrough Tracking

Earlier, they used a 302 but now they let Webmasters choose between 302 or a 301.

MyBrand

DNS skills NEEDED!

One can map the CNAME

Significance of Full Text Over Excerpts

• It is stupid to not push your full content in a feed. There are only particular cases when a partial feed is right
• Many data says full feeds are better.
• Encourages people to check out Techmeme and how they bring in feeds and create relationships based on the links and the data in the feeds.

Noindexr

• Yahoo! And Google are followers
• Turn it on in Feedburner

Robots.txt

• Force services to consume feeds or not

Use 'Auto-Discovery,' in order to announce the availability of your feeds to bots and browsers. If you use a podcast, do not just ping it to the MP3. Make a page and point the podcast to it . Search engines are text-friendly.

Facebook lets users import "notes"

• Rick Klau takes a poll of the number of users who import feed into Facebook account
• Almost 25% of the audience raise hand
• Rick starts to tell how to set it up

Next up is Stephan Spencer, Founder & President of Netconcepts. Spencer asks the audience if there are bloggers and how many use WordPress.

Blog SEO

• Easy enough for a child to do
• 16 year old blogger
• For passive content, you can make 1000$ a month
• Shows her blog

Optimizing your blog

• Rejig your internal linking
• Tag clouds
• Related posts
• Top 10 posts
• Next and previous posts

Build inbound links

• Add Technorati tags to your posts
• Become part of bloggers blogrolls
• Trackbacks & comments wont help with link gain

In comparison, hyphens are more ideal than tags.

• Title tags
• Blog name
• Don't use the same text for the page title and the post title

"SEO Title Tag" plugin for wordpress

• Download an SEO Title tag Plugin from netconcepts.com
• Employ the plugin to optimize title tags
• Plugin also allows for mass edits

Related Posts

• Increases inter-linking on the site
• Can use plugins or just call out and do it manually

Blog should be ranked according to what we want to be named for.

Anchor Text

• Post's title should have a link the the perm page
• Use neat-o-tool (webuildpages.com)
• There should be internal links to old related posts within the body of the blog.

Heading tags

• Category name on category page
• Yes for post titles, no for dates

It's a good idea to use optional excerpts in order to minimize dupe content. Build unique content.

Sticky posts

• Should always appear at the top of the page
• Great way to add keyword-rich intro copy to a category page or tag page. e.g. adhesive plugin

relnofollow

• With this you will not pass any juice

noindex

• This tag passes juice but blog will not appear in the SERPs
• This tag could use a robots.txt to do the same thing

Optimizing your feeds

• Full texts and not just summaries
• Add twenty or more, ten is not good enough
• Multiple feeds
• Add keyword-rich items
• Brand name must be mentioned in the title
• Your most important keyword should be included in the site

Last speaker from the panel, George Aspland, the founder & president of eVision is up now.

George laid emphasis on how to achieve rankings and CTRs via SERPs. For this one needs plenty of formattable text. The text needs to be well optimized. Title is key.

Google SERPs for a PDF showed:

• Document without any title
• Text included within images

Aspland recommends pdfs as they serve well in the long run.

Link to the PDF

• Try to get links from indexed pages
• Promote link pop

PDFs can have links

• Some even have active links
• Logo also works as a link to the website

Converting URL's in a pdf into an active link

• Links should be highlighted
• Export/print your PDF
• Open PDFs with acrobat. Acrobat also helps with editing.

Turning any text or image into an active link

• Instructions available in his site. Click here

PageRank & PDFs

• Both of these follow the same pattern as regular sites

Testing it

• Downlaod "optimizing PDFs for Search Engines
• Add links to 2 charities
• Post PDF and pass along
• Check out results in couple months

How to analyse PDF search results with Click Tracks

• Find which PDFs were entry pages to a site

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