Are Your PDFs Optimized?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Bob Dylan iconically sang “The Times They Are A’Changing.” It wasn’t just a message for the 1960s. It also applies to search engine optimization today.

The search engines are constantly updating how they index and rank web pages. One of the latest developments is the ability to crawl PDF files. That means, for webmasters, that you have an opportunity to optimize your PDFs for search.

That does come with some qualifiers, however. The PDF can’t be in a secured folder on your server. It must be accessible publicly by humans and by search engines. But you optimize a PDF just like you would an HTML page, minus the code.

What I mean is you optimize the PDF text with keywords and the most important places for your keywords are in the title, or headline, of the document, subheads, and scattered throughout the text within the document. Inbound links are also important for your PDFs. Create inbound links with strong anchor text that is relevant for the content of that PDF. Finally, use your primary keyword, the relevant keyword for the PDF document, in the URL for that document. Those three things will go a long way to optimizing your PDF document.

Here is a good example of an optimized PDF document, if is a PDF of the Brick Marketing company brochure:
http://www.nickstamoulis.com/Brick-Marketing-Brochure.pdf