How to SEO Optimize a PDF File for Search Engines?

The first question that comes to anyone is "Why we should optimize a PDF file?" while we are optimizing our website. Well, if you own/had an eBook, brochure or any kind of technical document in PDF format, those PDF's should be well optimized to get ranked in search engines like your posts do. A point to be remembered is that PDF's files can now be read (crawled) by most of the search engines but the thing is that they need to be optimized in order to get high rankings in search engines thus bringing an additional traffic to your website.

PDF documents or PDF books are indexed and listed by Search Engines in the same way a regular page gets spidered. One of major issue with the PDF docs share is the absence of a document title.



Required Set Up to SEO Optimize a PDF File

1. Acrobat Reader
2. PDF Book / PDF Document
   

Recommended Read

• How to Remove Restrictions from PDF Files for Printing
• How to Convert PDF to Text Using Google Docs?
  

How to Optimize a PDF File for Search Engines?

1. Open the PDF file using Acrobat
2. Go to File > Document Properties > Description (This will allow you to edit the title as well as other META Tags)
   
3. Add active and crawlable links in the PDF document body, including
   
   A] A Logo which links to homepage/about us
   
   
   B] A URL on the bottom linking to your homepage
   
   
4. Also in other properties sections, you can add base URL, company name, website name, etc.
   
5. And Finally, name it with a SEO Friendly File-name (Ex: pdf-search-optimization.pdf)

Common PDF File Indexing Problems

PDF files usually have both text, and graphical representations of the text, with indications of exactly where that text should be displayed. However, there are several cases where this does not work for searching:

• Documents which were scanned directly into PDF may only have the graphic portion: there may be no computer-readable text at all. These documents are not search-able.
• Documents that were scanned and converted from graphic display to digital text using OCR (optical character recognition) may have significant numbers of errors. This is more common if the original document is old or was not perfectly aligned. In this case, many search terms will not be matched although the words were in the original printed or typed text, because they were not correctly interpreted. Some search terms may be falsely matched if the OCR software incorrectly interpreted the original text.
• Documents with multiple columns which were converted to PDF by some layout programs will display correctly and contain the correct digital text, but they miss the text flow: the words don't come in the correct sequence. Therefore the search engines will fail to match phrase queries because the phrases were wrapped on the next line of the column in the original, but that relationship was not stored in the PDF.
• Documents generated by some applications will contain partial words due to hyphenation, incorrect coding of ligatures and extended characters (diacriticals and letters beyond the basic 26), and other unusual situations. These mangled words will not match queries, although the words were in the original text (via)

Note: You can always edit PDF file even after it is created.