Can You SEO A PDF File?
Not very many people think of performing SEO on PDF files. After all, they’re not web pages.
Ahh, but they are crawlable. And that means you should make an attempt to perform best search engine optimization practices on them.
Here are a few tips to help you SEO your PDF files better.
- First, break large PDF files into smaller documents. If you have a small e-book of 150 pages with 10 chapters of 10-13 pages each, then break each chapter down into its own document. Tag each document with relevant keywords.
- Make sure the PDF is text-based. Search engines like text and crawl text. Be sure to fill out the author, document title, description, file size, and modification date fields.
- Make your links within the document easy to find for the search engines. Don’t bury them. And use anchor text and good title attributes for those links as well.
- Make sure the search engines can read the PDF file format version number.
- Just as you would for a web page, make sure the PDF document reads logically. There must be a logical flow of information so that the search engines can more easily ascertain what the document is about and index it accordingly.
- Finally, ensure links from your web pages to your PDF document use the proper anchor text and title attribution. Those links are vitally important.
Performing SEO on a PDF document is largely the same as performing SEO on a web page with a few subtle differences.
Optimizing PDF Files
Search engine optimization is always changing, always improving, and that’s a good thing. One of the latest developments in SEO is that webmasters now have the ability to optimize PDF files. But how?
First, you have to ensure that your PDF files are not in a secure folder. Locked by security walls will cause search engines to be denied access and if search engines can’t crawl them they can’t be indexed. But other than that, there aren’t too many restrictions.
PDF files are optimized a lot like HTML pages. You can place your keywords in the headline of the document as well as in subheadings and throughout the document. You can also link out from PDF files to other pages on your website and use important anchor text for those pages. But more importantly, you can link inbound to PDF pages using appropriate and relevant anchor text to help improve their crawlability and ranking quotient.
PDF files also have author, tittle and description information that you can fill out when you create them. Use that information as the search engines may be able to use it for indexing.
Ensure that you when you create your PDF file that you do so using a text editor or word processing program like Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, or CoffeeCup. Don’t create it as a .jpg or it won’t be crawlable.
Optimizing your PDF documents is not hard and can be done just as you would do for an HTML page.