I am working on two sites that involve a large amount of PDF documents, in thinking about how the PDF files would be disseminated I examined my own avoidance of PDF files in search engine results. My reasons for avoiding them are:

• PDF’s are generally slower to open in my browser. They can be horrendously slow to open depending on the size.
• A (small) percentage of PDF’s crash my browser – but that small percentage has greatly contributed to my hesitance to open PDF’s in my browser.
• I am too lazy to download a PDF to my desktop to discover if it contains the content I am looking for.
• HTML view of PDF’s tends to be fairly awful in their presentation making it more difficult to find relevant content.

A PDF result in Google

A PDF search result also means the searcher may never actually visit the website, and that needs to be weighed up against the benefit of potentially having extra content spidered by the search engines.

Jakob Nielsen is a divisive usability expert you either love or hate. I happen to love him, and while I wouldn’t go so far as to say PDF’s were unfit for human consumption it turned out that he described pretty much all my reservations quite succinctly:

• Linear exposition. PDF files are typically converted from documents that were intended for print, so the authors wouldn’t have followed the guidelines for Web writing. The result? A long text that takes up many screens and is unpleasant and boring to read.
• Jarring user experience. PDF lives in its own environment with different commands and menus. Even simple things like printing or saving documents are difficult because standard browser commands don’t work.
• Crashes and software problems. While not as bad as in the past, you’re still more likely to crash users’ browsers or computers if you serve them a PDF file rather than an HTML page.
• Breaks flow. You have to wait for the special reader to start before you can see the content. Also, PDF files often take longer time to download because they tend to be stuffed with more fluff than plain Web pages.
• Orphaned location. Because the PDF file is not a Web page, it doesn’t show your standard navigation bars. Typically, users can’t even find a simple way to return to your site’s homepage.
• Content blob. Most PDF files are immense content chunks with no internal navigation. They also lack a decent search, aside from the extremely primitive ability to jump to a text string’s next literal match. If the user’s question is answered on page 75, there’s close to zero probability that he or she will locate it.
• Text fits the printed page, not a computer screen. PDF layouts are often optimized for a sheet of paper, which rarely matches the size of the user’s browser window. Bye-bye smooth scrolling. Hello tiny fonts.

But hold on, that was written in 2003 – what if Nielsen’s content is outdated, and so are my views? I decided to do a quick poll, just as a very basic temperature gauge as it were.

I set up a poll and asked the following question:

You do a search on Google and two results look equally good, one HTML one PDF. Which do you choose?

• PDF
• HTML
• Either, I don’t have a preference

The answers were random in order of appearance and the results were not visible to the polltakers. The results were as folllows:

HTML – 76% (107 votes)
PDF – 10% (14 votes)
Either, I don’t have a preference – 14% (19 votes)

I was somewhat relieved to be assured that I am not a fuddy duddy before my time, and that my reluctance to dive straight into a PDF is shared by many it would seem.

All of this is not to say that I hate PDF’s – I don’t, they’re wonderful, and if I am confident the content is valuable I will download them. The trick is to communicate the value in order to convince me to download. Usually a search result snippet is not capable of this communication. Enter “gateway” pages. Jakob Nielsen has a great article on presenting PDF’s through gateway pages if you’d like to read it.

For the client sites I was working on the gateway pages are vital, and we have ensured that the pages are optimised to be found for the most relevant searches and provided a link to the PDF documents with clear indication that it is a PDF and a note about the size of the document.

The question remained whether to allow the search engines to spider the PDF’s or not. In one case the PDF documents were third party licenced PDF’s and so I decided to avoid having them spidered by the search engines, as it would be vital to contextualise the PDF through the gateway page.

In the second case, we are still discussing the various merits of having the content spidered as it is proprietary content and therefore will have a brand awareness effect if downloaded and as the PDF’s will contain significantly more information than the gateway page, they may be found for certain searches the gateway page would not.

As always any and all thoughts are always more than welcome in the comments.

The traffic to this site is small, but focussed, and it’s no accident that the term ‘web design Cork’ leads people to this site.

At the time of writing, if you search google for ‘web design Cork’ you will see this site about position 3 or 4 in google.com and google.ie as well as searches for sites in Ireland. My aim would be to get to position one, which would bring even more traffic, and if you look back over this blog you will see the site has been climbing and climbing so that number one spot is not beyond reach.

Before I go into how I approached getting these results so far, I should explain that for those planning something similar, the first step is to choose your search term carefully.

Choosing your Search Term

I chose ‘web design Cork’ because it was highly relevant to my business, not overly competitive, and was a term that is searched for.

For example ‘web design Ireland’ would also have been relevant, but it would not have been quite as targetted and it would be a much more competitive term, making it harder to dominate.

‘Website design Ireland’ was also an option, but my research showed that ‘web design’ in general is a much more searched for term than ‘website design’.

It was a little harder to research whether it was a term that was searched for, because Cork is such a small market the data simply wasn’t there, however I was able to ascertain that people often searched for ‘web design [placename]‘, which was enough for me.

In order to research what people search for and how competitive the term might be you can use tools such as Web CEO (which has a free version) or there are online tools such as Wordze and Wordtracker. Google Trends is also useful for broad research.

So, once I settled on the phrase I wanted to target most, what did I do to get from nowhere to page one on Google?

Web Standard Design

I designed the site to web standards ensuring that the content of the page is as easy for the search engines to spider as possible.

Relevant Content & Page Titles

I ensured my content was focussed on ‘web design Cork’. The homepage of the site has ‘Web Design, Cork’ as a heading (a H1 header in html) and in the content. I also created another page called ‘web design Cork’, which is an overview of the site and who I am but includes the term ‘web design Cork’ several times throughout the content, without hammering it in so much it no longer reads well.

Regular Relevant Content

So my site was set up and included content on ‘web design Cork’, but search engines really love fresh content, so having a blog is a relatively easy way to ensure you can have regular relevant content. Yes, I know my content isn’t as regular as it should be!

If you look over my blog you will see I posted updates on my Search Engine optimisation progress with the term ‘web design Cork’ which I hope were of interest to people, but which also ensured I was growing more content that included the term in page titles, file names and content.

Internal Links

There are several links throughout my site which use the anchor text ‘web design Cork’ including a link from every page back to the homepage – this tells Google that I consider ‘web design Cork’ to be a relevant phrase for my site. This is not as valuable as other people letting Google know that, but it can help!

External Links

This is the singlemost important part. it’s important to get the other stuff right, but if you don’t get this bit right, you will flounder. At the moment links from other sites to your sites are massivley important when it comes to doing well in search engines.

The absolute ideal in my case would be to get links from other sites and blogs which use the anchor text ‘web design Cork’, but any inbound link will help if you have put the effort in elsewhere to ensure Google deems your site relevant for the term are targetting.

Directories
To kick off the process of getting links from other sites to my site I signed up with some directories. I think this is of limited value to be honest, but it gets the process underway. I feel that links from directories are probably not worth a whole heap, but if you sign up with a good few it at least brings your link count up from zero which is bound to count at least just a little. See my post on directories for a list of the directories I got my site linked to from.

One other advantage to directories is that with some of them you can control the anchor text used to link to you. See my post on the importance of anchor text to get an idea of the value of this.

So what else did I do to get more links?

Social Media & Twitter
I say Social Media, because there are many social sites that could potentially be useful, but the site I find most useful is Twitter.

It’s an indirect kind of boost in a way, but I signed up with Twitter in order to get a window into the Irish tech industry and as I got to know people on Twitter they got to know me.

In general Twitter can help raise your profile and generate leads, but in terms of SEO, it is my belief that when people make the connection between your Twitter profile and your site/blog they are more likely to link to you. I don’t conciously try to ’self promote’ on Twitter, but from time to time it just happens organically and I have found people linking to me due to conversations I was involved in on Twitter. I’m frankiep on Twitter by the way

Useful Content
Writing content that people will find useful is a good way to try to build links. It’s not always easy, but sometimes we forget that things that are second nature to us may be useful to others. For example I wrote a blog post on how to improve SEO and user experience on Wordpress blogs. I wrote the post based on the things I most commonly do on blogs I am setting up. It immediately got a couple of links.

My post on ‘What Width Should Your Website Be?‘ is another post I hoped people would find useful, and while it hasn’t got any links, it does get quite a lot of traffic. The impact of traffic on search engine positioning is debatable, but let’s put it this way, it certainly can’t hurt!

What I Don’t Do

I don’t post personal or non web design related stuff on my blog. My decision to only post work related items means that all the traffic coming into the site is somewhat more targetted. Apart from ‘web design Cork’ the other top search terms leading people here are:

• 2008 best width for a website
• website design cork
• website width
• design cork
• designcork
• what width should a website be
• cork design
• cork web design
• frank prendergast cork

It is my view that posting non relevant stuff would dilute Google’s view of the sites relevance to ‘web design’ and as such potentially affect my ranking for ‘web design cork’. Because these terms are all broadly related to web design, it all goes to improving my ranking for ‘web design Cork’.

But it takes so long!

Don’t expect an overnight success. This site has been live about 8 months, but having said that I have not been as attentive to it as I should! Certainly you need to be thinking in terms of months rather than days or weeks, but this site is proof that a concerted effort, even with sporadic updates can return results.

Good Luck!

I hope this post is of some use to anyone who wants to improve their site’s search engine performance. If you’re Cork based, feel free to contact me if you would like to hire me, or even just for a coffee and a chat if I’m not having a hectic week!

Since then I have seen a small increase in the rankings, moving up a couple of places from 14 to 12 on Google Ireland.

I do intend, when I have more time, to do some more intensive work and begin to work my way up into the top ten, and, over time into the number on slot. This project does show that competing on a specific and fairly general phrase takes work over a prolonged period, however, it pays off.

While I would like to be further along in the process (my client work has taken precedence and this project doesn’t get as much attention as it should) the results of targetting a specific phrase and having a relevant blogging strategy are evident.

If we look at the last month’s data, search engines make up just over 60% of the overall traffic to the site, and the phrase that is leading the most people to the site is, you guessed it, ‘Web Design Cork’, followed by ‘Website Design Cork’.

So while I will not be entirely satisfied until the site performs even better for the phrase ‘Web Design Cork’ you can see that the strategy is already working.

If you would like to talk to me about a strategy for getting more relevant traffic to your website, please feel free to send me an email.

Normally one might do a lot of what I am doing on this site concurrently, but in order to measure impact I have been doing little tweaks, monitering the search engine placements and measuring the results.

My latest experiment was to check the search engine positioning for the term ‘Web Design Cork’ and then add a page which was optimised for that term and see what impact it had.

On 15th of May 2008, the search engine positioning was as folows:

• Google (Ireland): Position 20.
• Yahoo: Position 16.
• MSN: Position 11.

I then uploaded the ‘web design cork’ optimised page to the site and linked to it from the homepage using the anchor text ‘web design cork’.

The results for May 1st 2008 are as follows:

• Google (Ireland): Position 14.
• Yahoo: Position 37.
• MSN: Position 2.

It has bounced around a little, reaching position 10 on Google Ireland at one point, and also reaching position 8 on Yahoo before being thrown back to 37 for some reason.

I saw a bigger jump in the rankings for the term ’search engine optimisation cork’, for which I performed the same type of test, however that term jumped ten places in Google Ireland from 42 to 32 which is easier to do – once you get closer to the first couple of pages the task becomes somewhat harder.

So what’s next? If I want to get a boost from where I am and begin competing for the no.1 slot I need to roll up my sleeves.

I need to generate more relevant content, which should be fairly easy using the blog, and also generate more inbound links. The best way to generate inbound links for a site like this is to try to provide useful content that people will link to.

Stay tuned for the next update!

I’ve been monitoring my search engine position for ‘Web Design Cork’ and had noticed that Google was obviously making up it’s mind where the site should be placed. The site currently wobbles between page 1 and page 3 – once I even noticed it at position 1, where it remained only for a matter of hours.

Link building is crucial to any site that wants to perform well in the search engines, so I decided it was time to begin link building, in order to give the site a boost, and my first port of call was the directories. Directories are essentially categorised links to a huge range of websites that people can browse through to find what they are looking for.

There are a huge number of directories out there, so I did some quick research and picked a few that don’t ask for a fee to be listed.

You should be somewhat discerning when choosing what directories you want to submit your url to, particularly with a new site with which directories will form your initial links – you don’t want to your site to start it’s life in Google’s eyes with a high percentage of your links coming from ‘bad neighbourhoods’. One very quick test you can do is to search for the name of the site in Google (& other search engines) to make sure it is indexed – if it’s not, you might want to steer clear.

It will be interesting to watch a) how these new links will impact on the search engine positioning for this site, and b) whether any of the directories send any traffic to the site. Stay tuned for updates!

bear in mind that some directories will list you immediately and other could take months before listing you – often offering a faster service for a fee. If, like me, you don’t feel inclined to pay a fee you should remember submit to directories early as it may take some time to be listed.

Here are the directories I have submitted the url to so far:

Irish Directories:

• SiteFind
• Browse Ireland
• Nice One
• Browse.ie
• Search.ie
• Find it Ireland
• Ireland’s Directory
• GimmmeDat.ie
• Nice One
• WebSearch.ie

Other Directories:

• DMOZ
• Clickey
• ExactSeek
• Web World
• World Wide Wub
• TurnPike
• DirectoryVault
• Domaining.in
• GetListedRightNow
• Visit a Link Directory

It’s not a particularly competitive term, and it while it may not bring a huge amount of traffic, I believe it is an achievable goal and the traffic it brings in would be highly qualified.

But these considerations are not what I want to discuss right now – I want to look at the power of anchor text used in inbound links. In case you don’t know, anchor text is the text used when someone links to your site, and can have a powerful impact on your search results.

There are several things Google takes into consideration when figuring out where your site should be placed in search results pages, and the anchor text in inbound links is one of them. In general inbound links are very important for your search results.

Google looks at your relationship with other websites, and a link from another website to yours is seen as a vote of confidence from that site. Therefore the more ‘votes’, or links, you have the higher Google ranks your site. Links from sites that already rank well in Google are aso worth more than links from sites that perform less well in Google.

The anchor text used in those links also helps Google place your site in the search results pages… and I thought I would do a small test to demonstrate the impact anchor text can have.

This site was at position 50 for a search for ‘web design cork’, and without changing anything else on the site, I placed a link to this site in a blog post from a site that Google ranks quite well, and I used the anchor text ‘web design cork‘.

I then sat back and waited for Google to crawl both sites again. When it had, a search for ‘web design cork’ was returned at position 21. From position 50 to position 21 with one link.

Linkbuilding is an important part of maintaining a website, and while you don’t always have control of the anchor text from external sites it is a good thing to be aware of – and there are certainly ways to control a portion of your inbound links, and ways to encourage people to use particular text when linking to you.

One very good way to build a good proportion of links you can control is to look at what widgets you could offer to people that would bring value to their site, while linking back to your own site with specific anchor text you can control. For example look at the widgets I created for FestivalShirts.net – the link back to the site is completely within my control and could be changed to include any anchor text I thought would benefit the site.

What other creative ways can you influence your inbound links?

However, at the time of writing, if you search for ‘Website Design Cork’ and ‘Web Design Cork’ it is ‘Website Design Cork’ that returns on the first page in Google.ie.

I originallly launched this site with ‘Website Design Cork’ as a H1 header on every page. I then redesigned with an image (with an alt tag) instead of a H1 heading. I wondered how this would effect the rankings for ‘Website Design Cork’, as headings are generally more useful to search engine optimisation than image alt tags.

After the change in design there was no drop in the search engine positioning for ‘Website Design Cork’. I Intentionally left the site exactly as it was, except for the design change – no new content, no links into the site, nothing but the change in design.

There was no drop in in the position, it remained at result no.19. I waited for the best part of a month, and watched as Google reported accessing the site no less than four times, and still non drop in position for the term ‘Website Design Cork’.

Despite the content focus on ‘Web Design’, a search for ‘Web Design Cork’ performed considerably less well, coming in at position 50… at least until I began to experiment with that too (more on that soon, keep your eye on this blog!).

So why, with so little content focussed on ‘Website Design’ is the site performing so well for searches for ‘Website Design Cork’? Well, may I draw your attention to the domain name of this site, in case you hadn’t spotted it – WebsiteDesignCork.com.

It would certainly seem to me that keyword rich domains can have a very positive effect on search engine rankings. Obviously, you have to consider that the content of the site generally confirms the nature of the site being relevant to the domain, but I would hope that would always be the case with a legitimate business website!

My potential clients are mostly local clients – Irish, and particularly from Cork, so it is vital that my site perform well in local searches.

Local searches are searches performed on Google.ie (as opposed to Google.com) and searches that use the ‘pages from Ireland’ option.

To ensure I perform optimally in these types of searches, I used an Irish hosting company. To determine what country you’re site is most relevant to, Google takes into consideration the top level domain (.com .ie .fr etc) and the IP address of the server you are hosted on, as they state in their webmaster tools support.

Talk to your hosting provider and ask them if you are unsure whether they can provide an Irish IP address.

While American hosters can be cheaper, if you are an Irish business and if your customers are based in Ireland, then it is important to ensure that your website is associated with Ireland.

There is also a tool in the Google Webmaster toolkit which allows you to specify the country your site is targetting, regardless of where your site is hosted.

At the time of writing, however, it is my belief that for a small and simple website which is targetting local clients the best option is to host with an Irish hoster.

If you are already hosting elsewhere, or if you have a site has different areas that target different regions, be sure and check out the webmaster tool – however if you already have a country specific top level domain, such as .ie you will not be able to change your target region using this tool.

If you have not considered any of this before, I recommend comparing your search results across Google.com, Google.ie and Google.ie using the ‘pages from Ireland’ option. If you are not performing well in .ie and pages from Ireland, perhaps you should examine where you are hosted.

Feel free to drop me a line if you think I might be able to help.