Billups Design

We’ve been advising clients for some time to optimize their PDFs before placing them onto their web sites. We recommend this because PDFs can contribute to a site’s overall SEO performance. Here is the kernel of what we advise.

Before you create a download link for that PDF on your html page and drop it in your site’s directory, know that there are ways to optimize that file which will actually contribute to a stronger search engine performance for your overall site – and possibly more customers for your business.

If you’ve ever done a search for something very specific on Google or any other search engine, you may have noticed that sometimes a result comes back that is not a web site, but a PDF inside a web site. Unfortunately, if the title or subject matter of the PDF was impossible to discern, you likely didn’t click on it.

So how does a web developer or web site owner ensure that PDFs are working to their best effect for the site’s overall SEO performance?

For starters, these PDFs should be tagged properly, contain optimized text, contain links to other pages, and contain title and text-based content.
Here’s a quick guide to the four most important steps to optimizing your PDF.

1. Using the document’s property settings, add a Title to the document where prompted. This will guarantee that the words displayed by a search engine listing will contain the important descriptors you want.

File > Document > Properties > Specify Title

2. Make sure your PDF is text based. Image-based PDFs like scanned images of text, for example, will not perform as well with search engines for obvious reasons. Once you’ve made sure of this, optimize your text with the best keywords and phrases you can create.

3. Be sure the first two sentences of your PDF describe accurately what you want to convey, or are selling. Search engines will often post these first sentences and if they are gibberish to a person searching for you, they won’t click.

4. Using the full version of Acrobat, select

Advanced>Accessibility> Add Tags

This will enable you to tag your PDF the way you might an html document, i.e. alt tags for photos, headings, etc.

Other complimentary strategies that can further enhance a PDFs search engine performance have been well explained by Galen DeYoung, Managing Director of Proteus SEO, on Searchengineland.com precisely here.

Other helpful sites on this subject include:

- a detailed tutorial at PDF Optimization Tips

- …and a helpful forum at WebSiteOptimization.com

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