Although PDFs shouldn’t take the place of HTML in terms of spider bait, you may have salespeople on the road or prospective clients who need quick access to your catalog by way of the Portable Document Format. So we don’t want to convert PDFs to HTML and then deep six them – they do not have to be mutually exclusive. Rather, we want to convert them to HTML and optimize the PDFs so they are organically searchable. If we want to keep them live for easy download, we may as well follow the simple steps that will render them indexable by Google while we’re at the squaredance.

So the million dollar question becomes how does one optimize a PDF for search? It’s actually quite simple - for every document you publish online, you should clearly define both the title and description in the document’s properties. To do this, right click on the PDF in question and select ‘Properties’ at the very bottom of the navigation menu. The following window should pop-up (These are two tabs of the properties window placed side-by-side to save space):

How to SEO a PDF

The top form allows you to change the document’s file name. I would recommend including keywords, separated by hyphens and not underscores. So, “online-catalog.pdf” could become “specific-discount-stuff-we-sell-catalog.pdf” or some variation. I have used a fictional camping store for the graphic example, in which case an ideal filename might be “discount-camping-equipment.pdf”. Don’t feed the bears, do feed the search engines.

The next step is to click on the ‘Summary’ tab. The possibilities here are pretty self explanatory - Titles, Subjects, Authors and even a selection of related keywords can be populated from this tab. Use this capability to its full potential and fill in your business or file-specific information. By default, this will be blank, so stuff it full of juicy data for the search engines. And voila, you’re just drastically increased the likelihood of your document showing up in natural search.

A few other notable points - Once Google has indexed your PDF relevantly thanks to your taking the time to fill out the properties information, it can index the text contained within. It may have already done this for some of your documents – but take the time to optimize the tags regardless. Titles, Subjects and Company Names will help intuitiveness when humans see at your PDF on search engine results pages. URLs in PDFs are often counted by spiders as precious backlinks – so proper hyperlinks should be included in all documents before they are converted to PDFs. Finally, Google also seems to hold PDFs in a positive light because they are completely impervious to comment spam. Read more from the horse’s mouth here.

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