Optimization Tips for PDFs: Great Advice for B2B Search Marketers

By ArticleSnatch on April 4, 2008

PDFs are particularly significant in B2B marketing, which makes optimizing them for the web is an important piece of SEO strategy in that sector. Thankfully, Galen de Young of Francis Marketing has a new post on optimizing PDFs on their B2B marketing blog.

Here are the key take away points from Galen's post:

Make sure your PDFs are text-based. Creating a PDF from a Microsoft Word document should be ok, but when you get into other programs like InDesign or Quark, then you run into text-based issues. And, as always, optimize the copy to reflect the targeted keywords.

Pay attention to Accessibility. The accessibility tools can be found under the advanced options. With them, you can order the priority of text on a page and create alt tags for images.

Customize your PDF properties. The title in the properties becomes the title tag, not the title of the file, so be sure to write an optimized title for your PDF properties. This is what searchers will see in the results of their favorite search engine.

Don't forget about usability. Optimization of a PDF is only good if web users can read it. Be aware that not everyone has the latest version of Adobe Reader. Save your PDF at a version lower than the most recent update. Also, make sure file sizes are as compressed as possible and use properties to see if you have a "fast web view." If not, go to your General Settings panel under preferences to make it web-friendly.

Specify the reading order. This helps search engines know which part of the text is most important on your page. Also, if your first paragraph wouldn't make a great description tag, consider creating a footer and making it number 1 in the reading order.

Other quick tips include:

Build links into PDFs (and be sure to verify them!)
Keep links to PDFs closer to the root level of the site’s file structure
Use keyword-rich anchor text to link to PDFs
Don’t do anything in a PDF that you wouldn’t do in a web page

PDFs can be forgotten when developing or redesigning a web site and lost in a greater SEM strategy. But when properly optimized they can be a powerful content tool for your business.

8 Comments

Niche
April 4, 2008 at 11:42 pm | Permalink

Great tips. Especially the one aboutputting the title we want to optimize for in the properties section.

In affiliate marketing, we find we are creating a lot of PDFs to use as bonuses on our sites

It would be great if one can optimize these PDFs to rank well in the search engines, giving our affiliate marketing websites another source of traffic
Trond
April 5, 2008 at 10:54 am | Permalink

I have been working with SEO for many years and I have encountered that optimizing PDF documents is very important and has a great matter in visibility for both itself and for other linked content. Usually I block Google from indexing PDF files in the robots.txt file since the users are loosing the navigation possibilities, but for specific material I both optimize and publish PDF documents with high Google rankings in mind. I also link PDF documents together and enable a seperate PDF sitemap in both html and pdf format. Try this for all types of documents if you want another positive experience Thank you for a great article.

Best regards,
Trond
Ankit
April 5, 2008 at 12:04 pm | Permalink

Great article thanks for sharing !!

Ankit’s last blog post..Dealing with a Website Copier
George
April 6, 2008 at 10:51 pm | Permalink

Good tips. Making it user friendly is very important. Optimizing the copy is ok as long as it comes out natural.
Jennifer
April 7, 2008 at 4:13 am | Permalink

Good article thanks for sharing with us
Dave
April 7, 2008 at 8:25 am | Permalink

I believe google’s PDF-to-HTML algorithm strips out images and tables. Even without them, I usually just try to use the HTML version if it has what I need, and will only go to the trouble of loading the actual PDF if I feel like there’s something in there I can particularly benefit from. I wonder if it would behoove marketers putting up search-accessible PDFs to include some textual indicators of what is in the pictures or diagrams, to encourage downloading of the actual PDF.

Dave’s last blog post..Chitosan
Hunder
July 16, 2008 at 4:09 am | Permalink

Optimizing PDF documents is very important, but “PDF friendly websites” and “print to pdf” content should be blocked for indexing. (My opinion).

Optimizing PDF documents for product sheets and so on is extremely effective!!

Best regards
Scott
November 9, 2009 at 12:46 pm | Permalink

You might also like Smart PDF Converter.
Works very well converting either pdf to word or word to pdf, and keeps the original layout.