PDFs have been used to excellent effect by all kinds of business sites. It’s incredible the number of times a simple, 10-page PDF manual has pushed a site up in the rankings above its flashier competitors. PDFs stand in as a sort of free product on the internet, and users react to them much in the same way that they react to free samples in real life. They are internet gold.

Content in PDFs can present some problems for search engine optimisation if you’re not careful. Unfortunately, many sites aren’t that careful about their PDFs. The temptation to fill a PDF with graphic content and freeze it so that its design cannot be changed can ruin any optimisation within the file.

While it’s true that the search engines are able to crawl PDFs, not all PDFs are search engine-friendly. This is because PDFs frozen as an image format are just as difficult for search engines to crawl as other images are. Search engine algorithms rely on text to provide information about a site and its content. Images are lacking in textual information, and different tactics need to be used to inform search engine crawlers about an image’s content. It’s much simpler over all if PDFs for SEO aren’t created through software like Photoshop. Text-based programs are best. Relying on Adobe’s own software is also a good way to ensure you get the right type of PDF.

Of course, simply saving the PDF in the right way isn’t enough to make it search engine-friendly. If you do save your PDF from an optimisable platform, you need to apply SEO techniques to its content just as you would for your site’s other content. Titles should contain keywords to the left, subheadings should be used to space out content, and you should aim for a suitable keyword density. Most PDFs will contain images, and it’s just as important to caption and tag these as it is to caption images on web pages. It’s also a good idea to look at the meta data of the file and optimise where possible. Don’t forget to include keywords in the PDF file name.

Search engine optimisation should be taken into consideration in the location of your PDFs on your site as well. It’s well known that content deeper into your site is given less attention by the search engines than content on main pages. If your PDFs contain valuable content, you will want them to be crawled. Publishing the PDF on a main page and linking to the PDF from your home page are two ways to ensure that your PDF content gets crawled swiftly.

Creating an e-book or pamphlet in a PDF is a great marketing move for your site. Optimised correctly, a PDF can draw users to your site and help boost your ranking at the same time. If you are interested in using PDFs and other objects to bring new life to your site, talk to our experts at SEO Consult.

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