Marketing Tips

Optimize Your PDFs to Generate Better Search Results

By Evan Silverstein, Marketing Assistant, Imagine 360 Marketing

PDF documents have become extremely common place in day-to-day business.  However, they are frequently overlooked as an SEO tool.  In the SEO world content is king.  Therefore, if you are posting a PDF document to your site, you should make sure it’s optimized so that the search engines can read them.  Below are a few things to keep in mind when posting a PDF document to your site:

• Make sure the PDF is text-based. The most important step towards creating search-engine friendly PDFs is to make them using a text-based program like Microsoft Word or Adobe InDesign. If you make your PDF with an image-based program, like Photoshop for example, web crawlers won’t have any text to read and will disregard the file.

• Keywords, keywords, keywords! PDFs rife with keyword-rich titles, headlines, sub-headlines, and introductory paragraphs – especially on the first page – are more likely to yield elevated rankings in search results.

• Optimize your content. Make sure your document’s text is focused, relevant, and unified around a cohesive subject.

• Formatting matters. Just like on your website, text attributes like bolding and hyperlinks will help emphasize your document’s most important information to both readers and web crawlers.

• Support images with text. Web crawlers can’t “read” images, so be sure to support images  with relevant text-based captions.
• Formatting matters. Just like on your website, text attributes like bolding and hyperlinks will help emphasize your document’s most important information to both readers and web crawlers.
• Support images with text. Web crawlers can’t “read” images, so be sure to support images with relevant text-based captions.
• Use Document properties. Use Adobe Reader’s document properties window (File>Properties) to create a solid meta description of the document and, more importantly, give your PDF a title! The text assigned as a PDF’s title is what search engines will refer to when generating the headline for a PDF in search results. If the title is left blank, search engines will generate one for you – one you may not have chosen – from text inside the PDF. Additional metadata to update includes: Author, Subject, and Keywords.
• Tag your PDF. Just like tags in an HTML page – text, images, headings, etc – tagging contents of PDFs enhances their search performance. To find out whether or not a PDF is tagged, view the document’s properties (File>Properties in Adobe Acrobat) and check the “Tagged PDF” field toward the bottom. If the PDF is not tagged, open Advanced>Accessibility>Add Tags to Document. Adobe will run a quick report on the document and recommend changes to consider. Next, open Advanced>Accesibility>TouchUp Reading Order, and begin tagging the document by highlighting blocks of text or images and assigning appropriate tags from the list of options.
• Edit the reading order. The descriptive text beneath the search result headline of a PDF is derived by the document’s reading order. Use Adobe’s accessibility menu to review, assign, or rearrange the order a PDF will be read. Search engines assume that a document’s most valuable content is early in the reading order, so it is the text most likely to be used in search results.To check your document’s reading order, open Advanced>Accessibility>Add Tags to Document in Acrobat. Then select Advanced>Accesibility>TouchUp Reading Order to arrange the order that search engines will review your content.
• Lead crawlers to your PDF. Optimizing a PDF’s content and metadata does not guarantee it will ever be crawled. To increase the probability and speed that a PDF gets crawled, link to it from another page on your site that get crawled regularly. This can help lead web crawlers in the right direction.