PDF Search Engine Optimization

Since my last post on new sales tools, I’ve received some comments about the value of PDFs over interactive portable documents – primarily the value derived from search engines ability to index PDFs. The point is that if you place your marketing collaterals online (such as brochures, datasheets, beat sheets, whitepapers and fast track papers) then you want these to be indexed by search engines as well.

The arguement is valid, but I think most interactive portable documents are also indexable by search engines. And I’ve often come across PDFs that make an interesting read, but aren’t optimized for search engines in the first place. So I decided to cover some points that are involved in producing search engine friendly PDFs.

• Text and not Image: The  value of search engines for now is limited to understanding textual content. So make sure that your PDFs have as much information in text format as possible.
• Title PDFs: Just like html pages, PDFs should have good titles,  headlines and headings.
• Document Properties: Most PDF publishers allow you to embed document properties such as subject/keywords,  author and other informational tidbits. Use these options.

These are the basic points I follow when I publish my PDFs.  But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Instead of reinventing the wheel, I  decided to slap together some good articles on the “Dos and Don’ts” from other  bloggers. Enjoy!

• A primer from Matt Mcgee on Making PDFs SEO Friendly.
• Another good read from Jennifer Horowitz about PDFs for SEO.
• A little monkey wrench of an article by Tim Nash on PDFs and Search Engines.

Update: I wanted to confirm if interactive documents can be spidered by search engines. I asked Joakim Ditlev from Zmags. He had this to say:

“Yes, Zmags are search engine friendly in various ways. You can read more about it here. Since this article was written back in April we have improved the functionality and in total our customers get around 10.000 visits / day…”

So, in short yes the interactive documents can also be indexed by search engines.