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Internet Marketing
Published date: September 15, 2008© 2008 Avangate page 1
www.avangate.com
 
Guide to Optimizing PDFs for Search Engines
8 Tips for PDF Optimization
 
Bogdan Popescu, Online Editor, Avangate
Internet Marketing, Published date: September 15, 2008
PDFs (Portable Document Format) are a good way to publish content, becauseof some features like high-quality, ‘lockability’ and consistency. Nevertheless, if they are misused, they can prevent search engines from indexing them. Thus,methods of PDF optimization have been created, in order to prevent suchthings like wasting content.Although some would recommend HTML, PDFs are considered by many people as a proper wayto present articles, whitepapers or reports for a website, meaning that important and crucialinformation should still be built as a webpage, not as PDF. PDF should therefore be employed asa way to create awareness and to show that you are an authority in your field of activity.We all are aware of SEO for the web, but how many of us do know that PDF can also beoptimized? Yes, it can be optimized just by following some general rules. By and large,optimization for PDFs is similar to the optimization of a regular content page, thus all the rulesinvolved are more or less the same. Here’s a nice article abouthow PDF files can be optimized.In addition to that advice, here is ours:
Tips to optimize PDFs1.Define PDF documents titles so as to be better crawled by spiders
Starting with the beginning, the name of the file is pretty important, thus I suggest naming itafter one of your keywords (
keyword.pdf 
), in order to help its crawling. Consequently, whenpeople look for your keyword, they will see your PDF in the search list.
2.Make sure to create text-based PDFs
It is common knowledge that web spiders crawl text. The most popular programs that createtextual PDF documents are Microsoft Word, InDesign, Quark. What you shouldn’t use for
 
 
Internet Marketing
Published date: September 15, 2008© 2008 Avangate page 2
www.avangate.com
 
creating textual PDFs is Adobe Photoshop – you cannot actually create textual PDFs with it, onlyimages. Image – based PDFs should also take into account the minimum resolution permitted –144 dpi.
3.Specify document properties for PDFs
I read some time ago anarticle on BusinessOnLinethat emphasized the following results:
•
 
Google reads Metadata in PDFs.
•
 
The Author of the PDF will appear in the search engines provided that it is inserted in theMetadataMore specifically, it is important to complete Properties’ forms with
Title
,
Author
,
Subject
, and
Keywords
. Nevetheless, I tried to some extent to take the test again on our own PDFs. Theresults were surprising: neither Google, nor Yahoo read metadata. On the contrary they arerather focused on the headings and subtitles of the documents.
4.Make sure to add links within your PDF document
Despite theadvice that Jackob Nielsen gavein 2001 to avoid PDFs for onscreen reading, Ithink that using a PDF can still be a great way to deliver valuable content without affecting themental flow that every internet surfer has and expects. Inserting links within the documents willensure the flow and the smooth passing from a PDF document to an ordinary web page.Therefore, the isolation feeling that PDF have created so far can be removed. It is also stronglyrecommended to insert links within PDF documents because of other factors; just think whensomeone sends an email with the PDF – the original source of the document might be lost.
5.Pay attention to the PDF size
It is of vital importance that your PDF should not be 'rich' in size and poor in content. Thequality of the PDF documents depends on who you are addressing to. If it is too big, the searchengine may abandon the PDFs even before accessing its content.Keeping the PDF document at a reasonable size can be achieved by selecting
Advanced
>
PDFOptimizer
to ‘right-size’ the document. Also if you are rather interested in a certain page of the
 
 
Internet Marketing
Published date: September 15, 2008© 2008 Avangate page 3
www.avangate.com
 
document to be seen by visitors, you can enable the ‘
Optimize for Fast Web View
’ option in the
Preferences
and
General Settings panel
.
6.Avoid excessive colors and ‘extravagant’ fonts
Maybe you don’t think this is important, but fonts and colors can slow down the ‘work’ of searchengines. Therefore, try to stick to fonts as readable as possible, and convert your text toGrayscale.I found in this article, calledBase 14 Fontsthe main 14 fonts which are recommended forusage in PDFs:
•
 
Times (v3) or Times New Roman PS MT (v4.x) - 4 versions
•
 
Helvetica (v3) or Arial MT (v4.x) - 4 versions
•
 
Courier - 4 versions
•
 
Symbol
•
 
Zapf Dingbats
7.Specify the reading order
The third tip revolved around specifying PDF properties. Well, that is not enough. Sometimes,search engines might fail to read the description you gave. Nowadays even more importantthan the title or the description is specifying the search engine reading order like in the printscreen below.Similar to any web page, even PDFs do have a reading order. Your priority should be makingvaluable content visible first. You can do that by accessing
Advanced
>
Accessibility
>
Touch UpReading Order
of Adobe Professional (in this case Adobe Professional 7.0). The main idea is touse the Touch Up Reading Order tool to manage what the search engine will read first.
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