Let us get a few things out in the open from the get go, in the world of SEO, PDF are not the highest ranked in terms of indexing. HTML pages are still much better at this stage because of the way that they can be crawled by bots. PDF are generally improving though due to content searching. There are still massive benefits having relevant PDF documents on your site. As with anything there are things that you’re able to do to make sure that the PDFs you make are working for you whether it’s on your webpage or someone else’s.
The key advantage that PDF documents have is that users perceive PDF documents as a more valuable entity, and hence are more likely to interact positively with a site’s PDF documents. This results in a better user experience, heavily tying back into a websites search engine ranking. If users have high value on content they are also much more likely to share that content – earning backlinks for the webpage! Companies that have a lot of documents in PDF format can then upload these to increase their page count, domain authority etc.
When creating PDF documents that are going to be hosted on a website or even taking existing PDF documents and hosting them on your website there are a number of things that can be done to help improve how search engines find and rank pages.
A quick scan of the internet will lead to an abundance of information that is often surmised into a continually varying set of checklists for PDF optimisation. Some of the things that keep popping up are below but I do encourage you to read a number of articles to come to your own conclusions on what is best for you.
Checklist for PDF Optimization:
- Keyword-optimized titles
- Key world-optimized metadata
- Add tags and accessibility options to your document
- Correct alt tags for images
- Back links to relevant pages within the main website
- Offer text version of the document
- Keep the file size light
- Avoid duplicate content
- Don’t save as the latest Acrobat version
- Write-protect the document
- Above all quality content
Depending on what you want to do, a number of Debenu’s programs can assist in optimising PDF documents.
For uniform changes to documents Maximus will batch edit as many files as required for metadata and a range of other things. Aerialist will also be able to edit the documents and this is a program that will work within Adobe Acrobat itself. If you are thinking of creating a program that will allow another program to help optimise the PDF documents Quick PDF Library is the SDK for the job and will be able to build in certain aspects within other programs.
In conclusion, PDF documents are definitely something that you want to ensure is optimized for search. There a number of reasons both as the file creator and also as a way to boost the sites ranking that hosts your documents. There is a diverse range of articles that are surfaced through a simple Google search of ‘SEO for PDF’ garnering terrific results, and many helpful guides and checklists. Scrolling through Everything out there can be a chore and ultimately leads to a similar string of information as to what to do for SEO on PDF. Debenu’s tools gives you the ability to actually do it what has been recommended allowing you create the best possible documents.
