Your client or company produces a lot of PDFs and you as the search engine optimizer know SEO and PDF have an oil and water relationship. Yes, the major search engines have come a real long way in indexing PDFs but from a search engine optimization perspective it is not optimal. You have begged and pleated not to use PDFs but they are still heavily used.
Here are some great tips to SEO your PDFs:
- Keyword Rich File Name – Just as you would on a regular Web page, the title of your PDF file is very important. Get your target keywords in your file name. For example if you are targeting the phrase Scotty Cameron Putters have the file name be scotty_cameron_putters.pdf This will give you the exact SEO relevancy match in the major search engines.
- Document Title Properties – Use the document title properties of your PDF file to specify a default title that will be displayed by the search engines. Using our previous example you may want to specify the title as Scotty Cameron Putters – Are They Superior? To access the document title properties of your PDF files are located in Acrobat under: File > Document > Properties > Specify Title.
- On-Page Content Optimization – Same as a regular Web page, optimize your on-page .pdf content for the search engines. Add a title at the top of the page containing your target keyword(s), seed your content with target keywords and optimize the first two sentences on the page for search engine display. Most search engines pull the search ranking display snippet from the top of the page.
- Add Tags – If you use the full version of Acrobat you have the ability to add tags into your .pdf. To do so, they are located under: Advanced > Accessibility > Add Tags and then seed this field with your target keywords.
- Build Text Links – One of the huge improvements in search engines indexing PDFs is that they can read links within .pdfs. Best practice SEO here as by providing anchor text rich links back to your own site you provide an added point of emphasis to your target keywords and the search engines. You also provide valuable cross-links back to your site to lure any document visitors.
- Link Building – A .PDF can be boosted organically by concentrated link building just like a regular Web page. Work to build in a couple of anchor text rich specific links from PR+ external AND internal sites (closer to your root domain the better) which link to your .pdf files. A good example would be to have an area on your home page that links off to these PDFs.
- Use An Older Version Of Acrobat - The majority of PDF file conversion users use Adobe Acrobat. The current version of Acrobat is Acrobat 9. However, most users and the search engines lag behind the curve by a good 12-18 months when adopting new software standards. Using Adobe Acrobat 7 or 8 to convert your documents will give you the ability to do all of the optimization included in this post and ensure full compatibility for the time being and the future as most software is as way backwards compatible.
- Use Little To No Images – Remember, PDF documents are a way to present text rich documents in a fully indexable non-HTML format that is readable by the search engines. Having many images defeats the purpose of what a PDF was developed for and can result in large file sizes which will make load times suffer and cause search engine spiders to bog down indexing or not index at all your PDFs.
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