When running a website, its extremely important to maintain a large amount of optimized content on your site. If you offer a large number of PDF files on your site, that content is being read, but it isn’t providing you the same amount of benefit as a well formatted HTML page. Getting a PDF file search engine optimized is yet another way that you can take advantage of content you already have on your site to bring higher page rank. Setting this up simply requires a little bit of editing.

First, when creating a document you will turn into a pdf, you should include the heading tags you would usually use on your website. This is because this data will be carried over, giving these phrases and sentences preference and helping to saturate your keywords. Once you have the content created, assemble the rest of the PDF and export it. You can now edit the metadata within the file using Adobe Acrobat.

Acrobat actually stores metadata in two differen places, so it is important to use both. Within the software, you should enter pertinent seo data in the Document Metadata menu, as well as the Document Properties section. Both of these areas include the basic fields, an HTML title, a field for author, subject, and keywords. It is important to include data in both, but you should avoid using the same information, as duplicate content is often penalized by search engines. The document metadata section includes a number of additional fields that are less important due to the fact that they are not looked at by search engines. So, once you have your PDF equipped with the important keywords, a keyword in its title, and a good description, youre ready to save it and upload it to your site. Optimizing everything may seem like a lot of work, but pagerank is key to becoming successful, and every little bit helps.

Posted by Ian Logsdon.
Did you enjoy this article? If so, then subscribe to my RSS feed.
There are more resources available at our On-line Webmaster Resource Center.