![]() If the link to your document says “download the pdf”, you are in essence telling the search engines that your document is about downloading pdfs. Just as with any web page, the text of the link pointing to the pdf document will have a huge effect on the terms it will rank for. It needs to contain target keywords, give a good gist of what the document is about, and entice the potential visitor to click, all in a very small amount of space. This is, effectively, your ad to a potential visitor. Second, and arguably more important, together, they comprise what will be the documents listing in a search engine results page. ![]() First, they are most definitely used in the ranking algorithm for most search engines. Most of these are a waste of time (including keywords), but the title and description are extremely important in two ways. PDFs have meta data available for title, description, keywords, author, etc. If the document starts ranking in the SERPS, a user friendly file name also has a distinct advantage when it comes to click through rates. Having a file name like “pdf-optimization.pdf” will not only help you rank for the words in the title “pdf optimization”, but is also user friendly to the end user (and your own sanity when you end up looking for this file a month later). Just like a regular web page, the actual file name of a pdf should be basically human readable and should let you know what the file is generally about. These documents are basically blank as far as search engines go, and all the value of the content is lost (not to mention, you will annoy users with the larger file size and the inability to copy and paste information from the document). While this is pretty rare these days, it still happens when someone want to retain a specific graphical feel. The biggest blunder you can make is outlining the fonts in the document. PDFs are crawled and indexed in much the same way as a regular website page, and many of the elements are optimized in the exact same way. ![]() If you absolutely must have them, there are a few things to consider: My first recommendation is almost always “don’t use them”, take the time to create web pages and a stylesheet for printing. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that these documents are rarely, if ever, optimized. All too often, I see websites using pdfs in situations that would be much better served taking the extra time to create a new website page. From my experience, PDFs are one of the most widely used, yet under optimized elements of a huge portion of websites.
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