Soup up your SEO game
With so much content online, and so many websites competing to reach the top of the search engine results list, your business’s website can be easily overlooked. Experts in search engine optimization (SEO) can provide a wealth of information about how to improve your site’s visibility within search engines, thus increasing your overall site traffic.
According to the SEO consultants at econsultancy.com, optimizing searches for PDFs from your site is one the “most overlooked SEO opportunities around today.”
You have a hidden advantage
One of the best ways to increase your site’s visibility within search engines is to try to get a link to your site posted on other well-established sites on similar topics or from comparable businesses. Unfortunately, many websites will not post external links to competing websites.
However, many are willing to share PDF files relevant to their site’s users. So whether you are linking your PDF from your site directly, or sharing it through another site, it’s worth taking the time to optimize searches for the PDF file.
Google and other search engines analyze PDFs in exactly the same manner as websites, so PDF optimization is very similar to page optimization and will increase the searchability and visibility of your site overall.
So here’s how to optimize your PDFs
Econsulty recommends several measures to improve searchability for your PDF. Many seem obvious, but it is surprising how few companies take the time to make their PDFs as accessible as possible.
The first step is to be sure that the PDF contains a link back to your home site, perhaps through the company logo. You might also want to consider including a link with a form email so that users who read your PDF can contact you directly.
Secondly, be sure that the name of the PDF file is highly descriptive and specific. Using hyphens helps clarify long strings of words, but avoid symbols like the ampersand (&). Use searchable, relevant keywords in your headings, as well as in the table of contents for the document.
Lastly, be sure that the words in the PDF are, in fact, cut and pasted text, and not images of text, as Google does not scan images for keyword content. Make sure each image in the PDF has a descriptive file image name, and be sure to also create extra alt content for each important image.
Optimizing your PDFs for search engines is just one of the many ways you can increase the visibility of your website, and who doesn’t want to take every advantage of the search engines?
