+1 And PDF Tweaks For Boosting Your Search Rankings

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I had been planning a post about the importance of updating your social sharing icons to include Google’s +1 button. You’d do this for two reasons:

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1. To enable site visitors to share your mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) content on Google+. You’d be joining the ranks of more than 1 million sites that have added +1 since its introduction in June, according to Google.

2. To optimize your Google search engine rankings and traffic. It’s Google’s +1 button, remember, and Google is believed to be paying close attention to content that’s +1ed (I know that's not really a verb, I'm just hoping that investment writing expert and loyal reader Susan Weiner is taking an extended Labor Day vacation). Only a human can +1 a piece of content and Google is increasingly acknowledging the importance of human signals as a complement to its algorithms.

This isn’t a small consideration as a short-lived Forbes post unambiguously suggested. "Stick Google Plus Buttons On Your Pages, Or Your Search Traffic Suffers" was the headline of an article that was supposedly based on a meeting with Google ad representatives, published and later killed. You can read more about the “touchiness” surrounding the issueon this Wired blog post and then see Search Engine Watch’s post from yesterday.

Don’t let this site change flounder on a Compliance review or IT priority list. You’re going to want to get +1 added to your site sooner rather than later.

PDF Tweaks

Of course, I realize that all this social sharing icon intrigue is relevant to a still limited number of asset managers (see our March 10 review of social sharing on mutual fund/ETF sites).

There’s no escaping the fact that many asset managers' approach to sharing is still limited to making Adobe Acrobat files available. The PDF is a favorite file format on virtually all asset managers’ Websites.

So, when I spotted this Google Webmaster post on preparing PDF files to optimize their rankings, I naturally thought of you all. Be sure to read this thoroughly, including what you’d need to do to get Google to index all those fabulous charts and graphs your PDFs include.

[<a href="http://storify.com/rocktheboatmktg/google-explains-how-it-indexes-pdfs" target="blank">View the story "Google explains how it indexes PDFs" on Storify]</a>