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.

To read Yael Penn’s comments and a summary of the roundtable, please visit http://bit.ly/aZ4ILu