PDF documents have become extremely common place in day-to-day business.  However, they are frequently overlooked as an SEO tool.  In the SEO world content is king.  Therefore, if you are posting a PDF document to your site, you should make sure it’s optimized so that the search engines can read them.  Below are a few things to keep in mind when posting a PDF document to your site:

• Make sure the PDF is text-based. The most important step towards creating search-engine friendly PDFs is to make them using a text-based program like Microsoft Word or Adobe InDesign. If you make your PDF with an image-based program, like Photoshop for example, web crawlers won’t have any text to read and will disregard the file.

• Keywords, keywords, keywords! PDFs rife with keyword-rich titles, headlines, sub-headlines, and introductory paragraphs – especially on the first page – are more likely to yield elevated rankings in search results.

• Optimize your content. Make sure your document’s text is focused, relevant, and unified around a cohesive subject.

• Formatting matters. Just like on your website, text attributes like bolding and hyperlinks will help emphasize your document’s most important information to both readers and web crawlers.

• Support images with text. Web crawlers can’t “read” images, so be sure to support images  with relevant text-based captions.
• Formatting matters. Just like on your website, text attributes like bolding and hyperlinks will help emphasize your document’s most important information to both readers and web crawlers.
• Support images with text. Web crawlers can’t “read” images, so be sure to support images with relevant text-based captions.
• Use Document properties. Use Adobe Reader’s document properties window (File>Properties) to create a solid meta description of the document and, more importantly, give your PDF a title! The text assigned as a PDF’s title is what search engines will refer to when generating the headline for a PDF in search results. If the title is left blank, search engines will generate one for you – one you may not have chosen – from text inside the PDF. Additional metadata to update includes: Author, Subject, and Keywords.
• Tag your PDF. Just like tags in an HTML page – text, images, headings, etc – tagging contents of PDFs enhances their search performance. To find out whether or not a PDF is tagged, view the document’s properties (File>Properties in Adobe Acrobat) and check the “Tagged PDF” field toward the bottom. If the PDF is not tagged, open Advanced>Accessibility>Add Tags to Document. Adobe will run a quick report on the document and recommend changes to consider. Next, open Advanced>Accesibility>TouchUp Reading Order, and begin tagging the document by highlighting blocks of text or images and assigning appropriate tags from the list of options.
• Edit the reading order. The descriptive text beneath the search result headline of a PDF is derived by the document’s reading order. Use Adobe’s accessibility menu to review, assign, or rearrange the order a PDF will be read. Search engines assume that a document’s most valuable content is early in the reading order, so it is the text most likely to be used in search results.To check your document’s reading order, open Advanced>Accessibility>Add Tags to Document in Acrobat. Then select Advanced>Accesibility>TouchUp Reading Order to arrange the order that search engines will review your content.
• Lead crawlers to your PDF. Optimizing a PDF’s content and metadata does not guarantee it will ever be crawled. To increase the probability and speed that a PDF gets crawled, link to it from another page on your site that get crawled regularly. This can help lead web crawlers in the right direction.

To read Yael Penn’s comments and a summary of the roundtable, please visit http://bit.ly/aZ4ILu

I attended the BtoB NetMarketing Breakfast on February 25^th at the Grand Hyatt hotel in New York City.  The Panel consisted of Emily Riley, Research Director of Interactive Marketing for Forrester Research, Matt Preschern, Vice President of NA Demand Programs for IBM North America Marketing, Brian Nizinsky, Online Marketing Manager for Eastman Kodak Company, and Mike Hardy, Social Media Manager for Pitney Bowes.

Below are a few of the key takeaways:

• With so many new digital marketing channels available, too many marketers are focusing on tactics rather than overall marketing objectives.  Marketers need to start employing a holistic approach to effectively use both digital and traditional channels.

• Though email will continue to be an important marketing medium, especially in the B-to-B space, database fatigue is likely to occur at higher rates and response rates will drop due to mailbox clutter.  For this reason, companies should consolidate their databases at the corporate level and frequency-cap their marketing email communications.  Lower response rates may also necessitate that marketers focus more attention on nurturing individual leads—behavioral triggers are often a great tool for this.

• Social media continues to be extremely popular; however, marketers should look to leverage these tools for more than just buzz.  Many companies are monitoring social media to understand how people are using their products, what consumers like and don’t like, and spot potential “PR disasters” (and proactively work to turn the situation around).  Others are using tools like twitter for real-time customer service.

• Niche communities with specific interests are an extremely powerful tool.  If developed correctly, these communities can provide a wealth of knowledge for both marketing and product development purposes.

• Search engines are “broken.”  New content has exploded on the web and there is no longer a search technique that allows people to easily find what they are looking for.  Panelists called this a transition period for search engines that would likely lead to more efficient search-tools and technology.

• Though attendees were noticeably curious about how to leverage video on the web — and panelists all agreed video is becoming increasingly more important — there were no real “revelations.”  Common uses for video included: marketing videos, branding videos, user-question videos, and instructional videos.  Panelists also stressed that videos should be named and tagged with the appropriate key words to enhance video-search performance.

• 2010 will be a year of “rebuilding.” Although most marketing budgets probably won’t be cut this year, it’s unlikely they will see great increases either.  Most companies will continue shifting their marketing budgets towards digital initiatives.

To read Yael Penn’s comments and a summary of the roundtable, please visit http://emailexperience.org/blog/2010/02/integrating-email-marketing-social-strategies-what-do-you-think.

Social media – it’s here to stay!
January 28, 2010 — People are spending more time than ever on social networking sites (Facebook estimates that roughly half of its 300 million users log in to their account everyday) and the ad dollars are following suit. A study conducted last year by Equation Research found that 59% of companies already use social media and an additional 28% plan to implement it this year. Furthermore, 25% of companies said that they plan to “significantly” increase spending for social media, compared to 3% of companies that plan to increase spending for TV and 1% that plan to increase spending for print. Bottom line, if your organization isn’t already leveraging social media, they’d better start in 2010. It’s becoming an increasingly important channel and if you don’t start paying attention, you’ll be left in the dust.

Mobile is about to ignite.
There’s been a lot of hype about mobile for years, but it seems that now it’s here to stay. In the US, more people have cell phones than cable TVs, web access or home PCs and nearly 50 million use their cell phones to surf the Internet. With such penetration, mobile will be an increasingly important channel for marketers in 2010 and beyond.

Email marketing will continue to grow.
Given the economic climate, the low cost and predictable performance of email marketing can’t be beat. Social media may have taken away some market share, as people turn to sites like Facebook and Twitter to communicate with friends, but email remains the predominant communication tool in the business world. So, if you don’t already have an email marketing program, you’d be smart to invest in one in 2010. If email is already part of your marketing plan, bolster your list with lead generation techniques and offer value-add content to existing subscribers.

Popularity of online video will continue to rise.
More than 78% of US Internet users view online video and this number is increasing. People like video and current technology makes it easier than ever to capture, edit and distribute. If you haven’t already ventured into the video arena, 2010 is the year to do it. The right video can quickly turn viral and catapult products or organizations into the public conscience. With such a tremendous upside, why not give it a try?

GPS chips and triangulation technology?
With the rise of applications like Loopt, FourSquare, Gowalla, Yelp, etc., Internet and mobile users have demonstrated a strong demand for location-based services. Add to this that more people are buying phones that feature GPS chips and triangulation technology, and it’s clear that the market for location-based media is expanding. Expect to see a lot of companies outside the technological realm leveraging this technology in 2010.

Search engine battles will spark innovation.
With Bing’s launch in June 2009 and subsequent agreement with Yahoo to power its organic and paid search results, Google has its first true challenger in years. In 2010, as these companies try to “one-up” each other, consumers and marketers will likely benefit from a slew of new search products and services. Google has already released Search Engine Results Pages (SERP), which displays real-time listings from LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter in search results.

Engage, engage, engage!
Engagement is no longer a buzz word; people want to interact with your brand and create an emotional connection. In pursuit of this, marketers should leverage social media and mobile as well as new video and ad technologies to manage the perceptions, attitudes and beliefs consumers have of their brands.

There are many variables that affect email deliverability, but one that’s often overlooked is the email’s HTML code. Seemingly innocuous things can severely impact whether your email will get to the inbox or be seen as spam. In this light, we’ve assembled simple tips you can use to improve your email templates and increase deliverability.

• Make sure your HTML is very “clean”. WYSIWYGs are notorious for putting in a lot of extraneous code that’s invisible to the user. Though this won’t affect the way your email looks, spam filters notice these unnecessary elements and assume the email was created by a spammer that doesn’t know HTML.

• Be careful not to overemphasize your text. Using bright colors, capitalizing multiple phrases or using a lot of exclamation points increases the probability that your email will be seen as junk.

• Give your email template a title or delete the title tags altogether. Messages that have nothing between <TITLE> and </TITLE> are often seen as spam.

• Don’t use hex-encoded domains in URLs (e.g. substituting the code “%20″ for a space in a URL). This can get your email blocked or sent to the bulk folder.

• Avoid using large images in your email; this is what spammers use.

• Don’t put any code beneath the close HTML tag. Many marketers put their tracking pixel here so that it doesn’t interfere with the main content. Aesthetically this makes sense, but it increases the chances of your message being flagged as spam.

• Include a text version of your message along with the HTML. You need to use an ESP (Like StreamSend) to accomplish this, but it’s an important criterion for many spam filters.

• Only test your email with real copy. Spam filters get very suspicious of emails with “lorem ipsum” or duplicate text (i.e. pasting the same paragraph over and over).

• Validate your email to address syntax errors. Common errors, such as using <a/> instead of </a>, have been known to trigger spam filters. The WC3 has a free validator that is very effective at identifying these problems (http://validator.w3.org/).

These tips are by no means all-encompassing, but they will help. There are so many spam filters, each with a different way of classifying spam, that there is no such thing as a perfect email template…and there never will be.

This article was published in Chief Marketer.  To continue reading go to:
http://chiefmarketer.com/disciplines/online/1022-triggered-email/

What is an open rate? It’s the percentage of delivered emails that recipients open. Below are a few tips you can use to increase this critical metric: 

Your list: If you consistently send to an in-house opt-in list, be sure to practice list hygiene.

• Segment the email addresses for people who have not opened your email in 90 days and ask them to update their profiles. This will either prompt them to opt-out or specify what type of information they want to receive from you.
• Only send emails that are relevant to the type of information the recipient has opted-in to.
• Remove all email addresses that have never opened your emails. Removing these people may decrease the size of your database, but will leave you with a more responsive list.

Open rates are not 100% accurate: Different email clients (Outlook vs. Gmail) and email formats (Text vs. HTML) will affect your open rate. Here are some of the discrepancies you should be aware of:

• Many email service providers (ESPs) place an invisible pixel in each HTML email and when this pixel is displayed, it reports back to the ESP that the email was opened. This poses a problem for text only emails because they don’t include this pixel. Although people may be reading the text email, they are not being counted.
• Microsoft Outlook counts an open in the preview pane (reader does not have to actually double click and open)
• Web email (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail) actually has to be opened to count as an open. Additionally, email clients usually have image blocking on default. If recipients view your emails in Gmail but don’t “download images,” it does not count as an open

Your Subject line and “from” field: Your subject line and “from” field is the first thing your recipient sees. Therefore it’s extremely important to make them relevant:

 From Field:

• Your “from” field should be a name your recipient will recognize and trust, such as the company name or maybe the company’s CEO’s name.
• Keep the “from” field consistent for specific types of email communications (i.e. survey vs. sales email vs. customer service email, etc.)

 Subject line:

• Make sure your subject line is relevant to the type of information they’ve opted-in to.
• Craft your subject line to peak their interest – don’t be vague
• Avoid words that commonly get flagged as spam in your subject line.
• Be honest – do not try to “trick” your recipient into opening your email
• When possible, use a mail merge (such as their name, etc.) in the subject line
• Test, test, test – whenever you send out an email, split your list segment in two and test two different subject lines (short vs. long, mail merge vs. no mail merge, etc.)
• If your testing subject lines, be sure to go back and analyze your results

Date and time your email is sent

You will often hear people say that either Tuesday or Thursday is the best day to send a marketing email because studies show emails sent on these days receive the highest open rates. I would advise you to take this information with a large grain of salt. If everyone followed this advice, it would mean seriously overcrowded inboxes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Do you really want to add to this clutter?

The only way to find out when your subscribers are most likely to read your emails is to perform your own tests to see which day performs better. Start off by testing days of the week and once you’ve identified a trend start testing the time of day.