Search engine optimisation is often concerned with optimising your code, architecture and text-based content, but SEO doesn’t stop there. It’s important not to overlook the other elements of your pages, such as objects, in your SEO plan. It’s vital to find ways to optimise your on-page objects.

Sometimes, the optimisation process is simple. For example, optimising images is a simple case of ensuring that they are re-sized at the file level before being uploaded to the server and optimising file names. When doing this, it is important that you are placing the right tags and content around them to get them noticed by the search engines. Other forms of on-page objects are more complicated to deal with as they involve lots of other factors. PDFs, the popular portable document format, are a perfect example of this.

Example: PDF optimisation

PDFs are a complex on-page object that is fairly common. Many businesses use PDFs to present important documents online or to provide an alternate way for users to access complex content. Using a PDF can be a great way to protect your content. It’s also a great way to protect against different browsers mucking up complex charts or graphics.

The main objective: size it down

A PDF generally represents a smaller file size than the document it originated from, but there are still ways to size it down. Like any on-page object, the smaller you can get your PDFs, the better it is for your SEO. A slow load time will discourage both users and the major search engines.

• Reduce the complexity: PDFs are only as light as their content allows them to be. When you use multiple fonts, numerous images, graphs and other multimedia content, the weight of the PDF increases

• Lighten objects within the PDF: The images and graphics contained within the PDF count toward its weight, so you should perform the usual steps of resizing and downscaling resolution where you can

• Grayscale it: Just as with images, colour PDFs are larger files. If you don’t need colour, remove it

• Allow for best compression: The default settings on most versions of Acrobat are for print, rather than the web. As printers require far better resolution, this means files saved with those settings are much larger than needed

These steps are specific to PDFs, but many of these factors apply to other on-page objects. Some objects, like embedded applications, take a bit of programming knowledge to optimise. It can be helpful to get the advice of an SEO expert when trying this complex form of SEO, and you can talk to us at SEO Consult.

Why bother optimising objects?

Your on-page objects may or may not be readable by a search engine spider, but their existence on your pages makes a big difference. If for nothing else, you should optimise your objects to reduce their weight on your pages, and decrease your page load times. Also, as they take up room on your pages, it’s best to do whatever you can to make your objects work for your comprehensive SEO plan.

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