Friday, May 20, 2011

The SEO purist may argue why anyone would ever want to use PDF content on a website for search purposes. The reality, however, is that many businesses have a lot of PDF assets. These may include sell sheets, brochures, white papers, technical briefs, etc. The purist simply says why not convert these to html? In the real world, not everyone has the time, budget, and expertise to do that. There may also be other “marketing” reasons. Perhaps a company wants its prospects to experience the content along with all the other brand elements inherent in its print materials. Whatever the reason, there are lots of PDFs available on the web, and you can optimize PDFs to get high-ranking search results. Here are some tips on the right way to do it.

1. Make sure your PDFs are text based.
2. Complete the document properties.
3. Optimize the copy.
4. Build links into PDFs.
5. Pay attention to the version.
6. Optimize the file size for search.
7. Pay attention to placement.
8. Influence meta descriptions for PDFs.
9. Specify the reading order.
10. Tag your PDFs .
11. Pay attention.