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Optimizing PDF Files for Your Website

PDF files may be the most widely used printable file format on the Internet today, but they need to be used wisely.  PDF files are crawled and indexed by all of the major search engines.  They will even allow you to limit your searches to PDF files; this comes in very handy when you are looking for specification and other types of product information that typically comes in printable formats.

PDF Search Engine Optimization

1. Create the document with the understanding that people will probably be downloading this and either printing it or sharing it with others.  This is the main purpose of creating PDF files for your website.
2. Use a text based program to create the PDF files.  MS Word or another word processing program is ideal.  Using an image based program like Photoshop will give you a PDF file that is basically a large image on the page and the text will not be indexed.
3. After your create the PDF file use the advanced features in Acrobat (or other PDF processor) to add an SEO friendly title, meta tags, description and any other additional information.  The title tag is different than the file name.  Each should be setup to be search engine friendly; use keywords and relevant information for the files content.  Remember, the title and the description will show up on the search engine results page.
4. Upload the PDF files into a directory that isn't so deep in your site that search engines will not index them.  Try to limit your site depth to one or two directories deep with any file type.
5. Add links to your PDF files on pages that are actively indexed by the search engines.  You should be able to check this on your website statistics.