So you’ve successfully put some information on the web in the PDF format. That’s great. You probably achieved that without any difficulties whatsoever. But have you been worrying about making that information optimized for search engines?
Making your PDF files compatible with search engines isn’t an extremely difficult task. Nowadays most search engines can read the basic contents of PDF files so you don’t have to do anything special with the data itself. However, getting your PDFs to top the search results page is the tricky part.
Wondering how you should start going about it? You’ve come to the right place. Google is, of course, one of the biggest search engines around, so using these starting tips as an example should also get you improved results with other search engines.
Use Your PDF's Document Properties and Metadata
PDFs have a lot of Metadata possibilities and it is known that Google reads Metadata from the PDF files that it spiders. So giving Google more information about your PDF and the data it contains will not only help it better place the documents in the search results page, but it will also better target the traffic for which you’re specifically looking.
There are several important fields that you want to be sure are filled in including the author name. Putting this this information in will have it show up on search engine results and result in a larger results area. It can be achieved in Adobe Acrobat by going into File > Properties (Document Properties) and File > Properties> Additional Metadata (Acrobat 8 ).
Get Your PDF Cited
Along with the author name Google will also display the publication date. Another feature is the “Cited by:� area of the search engine results. It seems that if another article cites your PDF anywhere in it and that document is indexed by Google, the citation will show up.
It doesn’t even need to be a link but just a mention of the title and author in the bibliography, which Google is adept at decoding and incorporating into results. This is a great way to get some extra credibility as well as a larger search engine result.
Keywords, headlines, subheadings and location
But what about the content itself? What are the major search engines looking for in PDFs? Well they’re looking for exactly the same stuff that they look for in good text-based content on the web.
Excellent choice of keywords will help to better target the specific demographics you’re looking to attract. Additionally, it’ll take into account headlines and subheadings. It’ll also recognize images and read the captions so be sure they’re there as well.
Other standard SEO principles apply like linking to the PDF from your front page, not putting it too deep in your directory structure and basically making it easy for the spiders to find.
OCR and PDFs
One of the major things you need to do is make the file in a text editor and then convert it to PDF format. If you make it in an image editing package the text may be lost to the search engines and be unreadable which means unindexable and pretty much useless in regards to search engines.
Since late 2008 Google has been using OCR – optical character recognition, a software application that is able to pull the text out of images. This means that images with text, scanned images and paper documents scanned into PDFs can now be searched and indexed.
This document, Optimizing PDFs For Search Engines, from George Aspland's eVision Online Marketing Blog, covers a good amount of information in regards to search engine optimizing your PDF files on the web.
These are just a few starting points to get your PDF up there. Further information on preparing your PDFs for search engines can be found below. A lot of articles are outdated due to Google’s OCR and other newer features so be sure to use the latest data available and keep an eye on the Google blogs—after all, Google is a trend setting search engine when it comes down to it.
How to Optimize PDF for SEO
Make your PDFs work well with Google (and other search engines)
Official Google SEO Starter Guide
Generic SEO tips and tricks
