So why do we get it wrong?

When a client comes to me and we start to discuss keywords and keyword phrases, they automatically assume they know what they should be because, quite rightly, they know their own business inside out. But that is key, their prospective clients do NOT know their business inside out, and so therefore do not have same understanding of what things are called, and what they can do. You need to step outside of your business and look at it through eyes of a customer, better still, ask them.

KEYWORD RESEARCH

Keyword research is a vital part of website marketing. This exercise should be performed prior website content being written. It is through this exercise, that we are able to find out exactly how many surfers searched for which keywords and phrases and how many other web pages are competing for same phrase. In short term it is not a sensible idea to target one word keywords that have over 200,000 pages competing for them. In long term, maybe but if you want to get your website seen and start to build up some traffic, then you need to concentrate on 2-3 keyword phrases that have less than 200,000 pages competing for them.

THE PROCESS

Step 1- Preliminary keyword list

The client needs to produce a list of keywords that they feel are applicable to their business. Keywords can also be lifted from any company literature. It is also useful if client can tell website marketing consultant who their main competitors are, and their web addresses. You need to think ‘outside of box’ and also think laterally.

Step 2 – What keywords are searched for

Armed with a list of keywords, website marketing consultant should now perform research with a tool such as WordTracker™ to ascertain:

First, why would anyone want to search engine optimize their PDF files? Well, if you had an eBook, brochure, product description or technical document in PDF format, you may wish to optimize these to pick up some extra search engine traffic.

Can search engines read PDF files?

Yes, most of major search engines now can read basic contents of PDF files, though getting these pages to rank as well as HTML files is still questionable.

How is it supposed to work?

This is how workflow is supposed to work. Create your file in MS Word, or in a draw or page layout program that later can be distilled into a PDF (with some applications you will have to create an EPS file first and then distill it and with other applications, you can distill right out of apps). If you are using a program such as MS Word, be mindful to apply H1, H2, H3 tags where necessary and optimize body text as you would an HTML file.

When you are finished, distill file. Bring this file into full version of Adobe Acrobat 6 for editing. Plug in appropriate content, post PDF on your website and let search engine robots index file.

How do I plug in appropriate content?

In Adobe Acrobat 6 there are two places to input content into a PDF file. The first place is under File / Document Properties and second place is under Advanced / Document Metadata. Under File / Document Properties there are several menus but most relevant for our purposes is Description menu. Under Description menu, there are fields for Title, Author, Subject and Keywords.

Now to confuse matters more, let’s go over to Advanced / Document Metadata menu. There are a couple of choices here, but let’s once again look at Description menu. Under this Description menu, there are fields for Title, Author, Description, Description Writer, Keywords, Copyright State, Copyright Notice and Copyright Info URL.

How does PDF store data?

With duplicate fields, it is important to find out how data is stored so that we may make some educated guesses as to how search engines read this data. I performed a few small experiments and here is what I have found. The Title and Author fields seem to be linked to each other because when you change one and check on other you will see it too has changed. Also, Subject field of Document Properties menu seems to be linked to Description field of Document Metadata menu for same reasons. The Keyword fields, however, are not linked. Separate sets of keywords can be added to both fields. When file is saved, both sets of keywords are stored in PDF file.

Which set of keywords is correct then?