Tingalls Blog - Marketing Tips & Tricks

Are your PDFs SEO Friendly?

Some people shy away from using PDFs on their websites because they’re afraid that this

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format cannot be scanned by search engines. But rest assured, your PDF can and will be included in search engine rankings. This means that each and every PDF you use on your website should be optimized to take advantage of the content and to boost your rankings. So how do you make a PDF SEO friendly?
Text Based PDF
Search engines can crawl through content on text based PDFs, not on image based ones so you need to create your PDFs with text editing software, like MS Word, and not in image editing software, like Adobe Photoshop.
Keywords
As with any SEO project, the keywords you choose and how you use them is very important to the search engines. Make sure you’re using industry appropriate keywords, that they’re repeated in a regular, not spammy, fashion and use keywords in image labels if appropriate.
Document Properties
Take full advantage of your ability to create the document properties and give the PDF an appropriate title with useful keywords, list an author, supply the subject and keywords.  Omitting this step is like inviting someone to your apartment and then not telling them which unit is yours, you’re missing a huge opportunity that may leave many people walking away without ever finding you.
If you do the above SEO tips for PDFs you’ll find that your PDFs may draw just as much, if not more, traffic than your other web pages. So don’t shy away from PDFs, just learn how to make them search engine friendly.