|
25 February 2010
Posted in
S.E.O
Many sites use PDF files these days, and they can sometimes act like separate web pages. To get the maximum SEO performance out of your Website, you need to optimise all your PDF files too. There are many PDF files that now have a good rank on search engines, and if yours doesn’t seem to have been crawled or indexed, here’s a few tips on how to Search Engine Optimize your PDF’s.
1. Only Use Text-Based PDF Editors
Search engines can read the text content of a PDF, as long as it has been created with a text-based editor, otherwise some PDF editors/converters will have every page as an image file, meaning the text is invisible to the search engines. There are many image based editors, and they will leave your PDF file unreadable to the search engines even if it was first created as text. If you don’t want your PDF to be ignored then download a free text-based PDF editor, there are tons of these all over the web. If you don’t know if your editor is text or image based then find out, if you can’t work it out, download a new editor. If you’re using Adobe Acrobat, this is text based if you are not sure.
2. Include Links to Your Site Within The PDF
When someone opens your PDF from a search engine, they will probably want to visit your main site. If you do not include a link then how will they find your main site without doing another search? Also, Google will count these links as backlinks, so it can help with link building and PageRank areas of SEO, as well as increasing the chance that the reader of the PDF will visit your main site.
3. Use The PDF’s Title
Make sure you put in a title for all your PDF files and make sure it's relevant and describes what the content within the file contains. The title of a PDF document is as important as the title tag of a webpage, it's important to how a search engine will view and rate your file. If the title and content are not relevant to each other, the file or page in question will have a low quality score, but if the title and content are perfectly relevant, then this will push your quality score up. Don't forget to also put relevant keywords in the file name, it all helps in Google's eyes.
4. Fill In The Rest of The Document Properties
There are a few other fields in the description other than the title. There are keywords, description, copyright information, and author information. This information can be helpful to some people and description will be crawled by search engines, much like the title, if relevant is a good thing. You should always fill these areas in with relevant and correct information. Don’t overload the keywords property, as Google and other search engines will not be happy with it. We have no solid proof that Google uses the keywords for PDF files at the moment, but with Google changing practically every day, it's a good idea to anticipate and try and stay a step ahead of Google, as hard as it may be.
5. Optimise Content Within The PDF
Whenever there is content, there is room for optimizing that content for SEO. The content that can be contained within a text-based PDF is extremely similar to the content that can be contained within a Website. The content needs to be relevant to the subject or cause, there needs to be relevant pictures with relevant titles and descriptions (always include these to give the search engines text to tell them what the picture is of). Remember to always use the full functionality of text formatting to your advantage, i.e. making important text bold, italic, bigger size, different colour or different fonts, there is even a highlighting tool that you can use. Lastly always remember to use relevant keywords within the content, and before you make it the final draft make sure that every last bit of information is relevant to absolutely everything else, if it isn’t then remove that piece of the content.
6. Don’t Bury Your PDF Files Too Deep
If your PDF is hidden deep within your Website, chances are the robots won't crawl the file, and it will not be indexed. Try to keep PDF files within 2 or 3 pages away from your homepage, or if you have an extremely large number of PDF files then make sure your important ones are less than 3 pages from the homepage. This will make them easier to find for everyone, as well as ensuring that they get crawled so there is a much higher chance of that PDF file being indexed.
A PDF has many of the capabilities that a web page possesses and as such needs as much SEO care put into it as any other web page, meaning a great deal of effort needs to be provided to ensure every detail is optimized to do well in search rankings. If you need more help or have a problem/question, leave it as a comment below. If you need more SEO ideas to implement in your PDF’s and websites, you will find our SEO Blog articles very helpful.
