Optimizing PDF’s for Search Engines
17 Sep 2010 Leave a Comment
in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Marketing Strategies Tags: PDF, PDF optimization, seo
When it comes to optimizing the pages on your website, PDF’s should not be overlooked. Engines do crawl them and quite often they show up very high in organic search results. Many companies have a plethora of content assets that come in the form of PDF’s. From marketing brochures, white papers, technical bulletins to press releases, and each of them should be optimized for engines before its placed on your site.
Here are a few tips to optimize your PDF’s for search engines.
PDF Optimizations:
1. Include keywords in the PDF name, just like you would a web page or directory. The keywords should be relevant to the content found within the PDF.
2. Just like your web pages, the content in your PDF needs to by keyword rich. Use the keywords you are trying to optimize the PDF for frequently.
3. Make sure your PDF is text-based and not image based. Engines crawl text plain and simple. If you PDF an image instead of say a word doc, you may as well just post the image to your website. You can see what engines will crawl in a PDF using Adobe Acrobat’s “Select Text” tool. If you can’t select the text, engines can’t read it.
4. Always specify the document properties (meta data) in the PDF. In Acrobat go to Tools>Document metadata to do so. You can specify the author, keywords, copyright, description and most importantly the title. The title is equivalent to a title tag on a web page and if you specify this it will provide engines with specific text to display in their search result, else the engines will just pick up a line of copy from the PDF, which may not be ideal.
5. Build links into the PDF. Engines will follow them. If you are sending out a PR over the Internet in PDF form, these links will count as a back link to your site – which is very important for SEO.
6. Keep links to PDF’s close to the root structure of your site. If you are using them for SEO purposes, you want to link to them from pages that are 1 or 2 levels deep. Making it easier and faster for engines to crawl.
Quick usability tips:
1. Open all PDF’s in a new window.
2. Optimize the file size for end-users and for search engines. If it’s a very large (think high res) PDF, it could take a while to open. Most users will give up and engines do not like a slow page load time either. If you are using Adobe Acrobat you can set the PDF to load page by page instead of waiting for the document to fully load by enabling the “Optimize for Fast Web View” option in the Preferences>General Settings area.
