Optimising PDF documents

For some businesses, PDF files are an extremely useful way of providing documents that are designed to be printed. In some situations they have the major advantage of being completely self-contained, allowing them to be easily saved on to a computer and redistributed. For this reason, they are always going to be much better for some sorts of documents, than say, a word document or HTML file with a print style sheet.

They are, however, never likely to rank as highly as an HTML page, but there are some steps that can be taken to get the best out of a PDF file.

Meta Data: Adobe Acrobat has some meta data functions that can prove to be useful as they are taken into account by Google.

You can find these options under File/Document Properties and Advanced/Document Metadata.
The same rules apply as with any HTML page. Keep the data unique to each file and related to the content. Remember that you are trying to describe to Google what the file actually contains, and not trying to sell a product.

File Size: Try and keep the file size down as much as possible. Large images and embedded media can make the PDF file size shoot up.

Link Name and File Name: The anchor text for the PDF file should be related to the content. So don’t use something like “Click Here for a PDF”. The file itself will also benefit from being named after something related to the content.

You can also submit PDFs to numerous eBook directories if appropriate, to gain some useful links and make your files more findable.

Simon Davies
SEO Programmer