Keith Vera
Account Manager
PDF downloads are a great way to publish content to your site and establish extra conversion points for any interactive marketing campaign. Optimizing those PDFs on your site however, is particularly important and often overlooked during the creation process. If PDFs are not created correctly search engines will not be able to index their content, and like all un-optimized content, that PDF will be a wasted opportunity to improve search engine rankings.
Galen De Young recently blogged about the different strategies marketers can use to optimize PDFs for the web, as a follow up to Marketing Sherpa’s article: How to Optimize Your PDFs to Increase Search Traffic: 10 Steps
Below are several key takeaways from both Galen’s blog and the article:
- Not all PDFs are created equal: PDFs that are picture based or are scans of original documents will not allow engines to index the text. Instead create PDFs straight from Microsoft Word documents
- Use the PDF properties to add an optimized title for the document
- Build links into all of your PDFs
- Make sure to use keyword-rich anchor tags to link to your PDFs
- Specify the reading order in the document so the engines know which text is the most important and will help you with the indexed description of the document
