What is the first image that comes to your mind when you hear the word ‘Finnish’? If you are not familiar with Finland, Finns or Finnish culture maybe you will see an idyllic snowed landscape with smoking chimney cottages and possibly some reindeers wandering around. On the other hand if you are close enough to this Nordic country surely some immaculate sauna, hi-tech mobile phone or salmon over rye bread images will fly in your mind. But what does Google Images think about keyword ‘Finnish’?

That is what @taalto wanted to show on an experiment that compares the results Google Images gives for ‘Finnish’ and ‘Swedish’ keywords. Images speak by themselves, while for the ‘Finnish’ search pictures showed are:

the results for ‘Swedish’ search are:

After this experiment an initiative was born from Finnish Advertising Agency W. Steinmann to try to revert these negative tendencies. They used a simple SEO technique of tagging uploaded photos -  whether the file name, alt-tag or surrounding text, with the keyword ‘Finnish’. Perhaps the simplicity of the technique is the reason why its often overlooked.

The Campaign for Finnish Image(s) aims at improving the quality of pictures going around the web, reflecting more realistically the modern life in Finland. Can a simple SEO practice make the difference on how Finland is perceived? At least through search engines eyes. This is a job not only for the Finnish authorities, but for anyone who lives or loves this magic land.

Landing pages are very important to any online advertising program. A landing page is highly optimized page that has a targeted call-to-action. This call-to-action can be as simple as a download, signup or demo. When the visitor acts on the call-to-action, the visitor is said to have “converted.” 

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For the past few weeks, I’ve been testing three very different modes of online advertising including Google AdWords, LinkedIn Direct Ads and Facebook Ads. The Google network generates highly targeted, active leads and the other two leverage a pool of professional/social networking users. Read more… »

Since my last post on new sales tools, I’ve received some comments about the value of PDFs over interactive portable documents – primarily the value derived from search engines ability to index PDFs. The point is that if you place your marketing collaterals online (such as brochures, datasheets, beat sheets, whitepapers and fast track papers) then you want these to be indexed by search engines as well.

The arguement is valid, but I think most interactive portable documents are also indexable by search engines (see update below.) And I’ve often come across PDFs that make an interesting read, but aren’t optimized for search engines in the first place. So I decided to cover some points that are involved in producing search engine friendly PDFs.

  • Text and not Image: The  value of search engines for now is limited to understanding textual content. So make sure that your PDFs have as much information in text format as possible.
  • Title PDFs: Just like html pages, PDFs should have good titles,  headlines and headings.
  • Document Properties: Most PDF publishers allow you to embed document properties such as subject/keywords,  author and other informational tidbits. Use these options.

    • These are the basic points I follow when I publish my PDFs.  But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Instead of reinventing the wheel, I  decided to slap together some good articles on the “Dos and Don’ts” from other  bloggers. Enjoy!

  • Another good read from Jennifer Horowitz about PDFs for SEO.
  • A little monkey wrench of an article by Tim Nash on PDFs and Search Engines.

    • I wanted to confirm if interactive documents can be spidered by search engines. I asked Joakim Ditlev from Zmags. He had this to say:

    “Yes, Zmags are search engine friendly in various ways. You can read more about it here. Since this article was written back in April we have improved the functionality and in total our customers get around 10.000 visits / day…”

    So, in short yes the interactive documents can also be indexed by search engines.

    In a recent conversation with Ville Kuusela about sales processes he mentioned that because we work in a B2B environment, we often forget B2C sales tactics still apply. His point was simple: we overlook the fact that we’re selling to people and not just to businesses. Not only do we need to convince buyers on the business merits but also make a human connection – very much as we do with consumers.

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    Factors to consider when focusing on SEO as a marketing strategy:


    A Brief Explanation
    Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a marketing strategy based on the way Internet users view search results. Similar to print advertisements, studies show that a user will scan their search results from left to right, top to bottom. The theory is that links placed first, or highest on the list will get the most hits. Therefore, SEO focuses on editing the content, keywords, and HTML coding of a website to boost its relevance to specific search terms in order to achieve a higher ranking within search results.
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    This is a continuation to the blog entry from a few days ago where I compiled a comparison matrix between the two advertising platforms. Read more… »