PDF Optimisation
Do you have PDFs on your site? Have you considered the SEO potential of these documents and optimised them accordingly? A useful recent article on Search Engine Land covers some of the SEO techniques that can be used with PDFs, but are often neglected. The article offers tips on PDF optimisation for high search engine rankings. I will cover some of them here:1. Write good, keyword rich content in the PDF. This follows on from one the basic techniques in standard SEO, and ensures the search engines will find your PDF for the keywords you have chosen.
2. Make sure your PDF's are text based. When the PDF is made using images, the spiders can't read it.
3. Complete the "title" document property. The equivalent of the HTML title tag, this is the line of text that shows up in the search results. Often it is left blank, with the title of the PDF showing as "pdf". This is unlikely to get clicked. To specify a PDF title, go to File>Document Properties.
4. Pay attention to the version. The article comments: "While search engines do “read” and index PDFs, search engines’ capabilities tend to lag new versions of Acrobat. Although Acrobat 8 is out, for now you should save your PDFs as version 1.6 (Acrobat 7) or lower to ensure search engines can index the content. Not only is saving PDFs at a lower version good for the search engines, it’s also good for users. Not everyone has the latest versions of Acrobat Reader. Accordingly, I’d recommend saving PDFs as version 1.5 or lower. This way it will be good for search engines and most readers.
5. Keep you PDF's a manageable size. Not only is this annoying and unnecessary for site visitors, it’s also burdensome for the search engines. If it’s too big, the search engines may abandon the PDF before even getting access to its content. Using the full version of Acrobat, select Advanced>PDF Optimizer to “right-size” the document.
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