Aside from web pages, a website can also contain assets like videos, presentations, spreadsheets, and documents. Some of these documents may be in the PDF format. A PDF file can be a technical document, a brochure, or an e-book. Most search engine crawlers can read the content and can index a website’s PDF files.
A file in PDF format is, in some aspects, similar to a web page. Just like the need to optimize your web pages, you must also optimize your PDF files in order to attain higher rankings in the search engine page results. By optimizing your PDF files, you can get them indexed faster and ranked favorably by search engines. Many well-optimized PDF files now rank well in search engine page results and has been giving traffic for their websites.
If you have no idea how to optimize your PDF files, here are some of the things that you can do:
Opt For A Text-Based PDF Creator
Choose a text-based PDF creator when creating your PDF file. You can find many of these online. If you don’t use a text-based PDF creator, your PDF may not be read and get indexed by search engine crawlers. If your PDF file was made in an image-based program, the search engine robots cannot read it so they will just completely ignore it. If you want to improve your web presence, you need to get your files indexed by these search engine robots. If you use a text-based creator like Adobe Acrobat when creating your file, you are enabling search engine robots to read and index your file just like any other web page.
Update Your File’s Title
Just like the title tag of a web page, the title that you assign to your PDF file is also important. The search engine crawlers or robots will know the type of content through the title property of PDF files. Moreover, search engines usually use the text in the title field as the search engine results page’s link. Therefore, you must ensure that you include your keywords in the title field and to avoid including random text in it.
Complete Your Document Properties And Optimize Its Content
Aside from the title field, you must also pay attention to the many document properties of your PDF file like description, keywords, copyright info, and author info. You must complete all these fields with relevant information. Take care that your keyword field is not empty or is overstuffed with keywords.
You must also optimize the content of your PDF file similar to how you optimize the content of your website or web page. Aside from ensuring that your content is relevant to your subject matter, you should also highlight the important text by increasing their font size or making them in bold or in italics. Also remember to place your keywords at the first few line of your content.
Linking up
You need link your PDF from hour homepage. If it is placed too deep within your website and there is no link to it, the search engine crawlers may not find and index it. Your PDF file must be visibly linked from your homepage to ensure that it gets found by the crawlers. In short, you need to lead these search engine crawlers to it.
You would also need to include links in your PDF file. If your PDF file ranks on the top of search engine results and when a visitor opens it, there should be a link back to its original site. With this, the visitor will not have to hunt or look for the file’s main website. Moreover, the link contained in the PDF file can also be considered by search engines as a backlink.
Now you should go over your passed PDFs – good luck,
Ray Baker