8 Tips for PDF Optimization

PDFs (Portable Document Format) are a good way to publish content, because of some features like high-quality, ‘lockability’ and consistency. Nevertheless, if they are misused, they can prevent search engines from indexing them. Thus, methods of PDF optimization have been created, in order to prevent such things like wasting content.

Although some would recommend HTML, PDFs are considered by many people as a proper way to present articles, whitepapers or reports for a website, meaning that important and crucial information should still be built as a webpage, not as PDF. PDF should therefore be employed as a way to create awareness and to show that you are an authority in your field of activity.

We all are aware of SEO for the web, but how many of us do know that PDF can also be optimized? Yes, it can be optimized just by following some general rules. By and large, optimization for PDFs is similar to the optimization of a regular content page, thus all the rules involved are more or less the same. Here’s a nice article about how PDF files can be optimized. In addition to that advice, here is ours:

Tips to optimize PDFs

1. Define PDF documents titles so as to be better crawled by spiders

Starting with the beginning, the name of the file is pretty important, thus I suggest naming it after one of your keywords (keyword.pdf), in order to help its crawling. Consequently, when people look for your keyword, they will see your PDF in the search list.

2. Make sure to create text-based PDFs

It is common knowledge that web spiders crawl text. The most popular programs that create textual PDF documents are Microsoft Word, InDesign, Quark. What you shouldn’t use for creating textual PDFs is Adobe Photoshop – you cannot actually create textual PDFs with it, only images. Image – based PDFs should also take into account the minimum resolution permitted – 144 dpi.

3. Specify document properties for PDFs

I read some time ago an article on BusinessOnLine that emphasized the following results:

• Google reads Metadata in PDFs.
• The Author of the PDF will appear in the search engines provided that it is inserted in the Metadata

More specifically, it is important to complete Properties’ forms with Title, Author, Subject, and Keywords. Nevetheless, I tried to some extent to take the test again on our own PDFs. The results were surprising: neither Google, nor Yahoo read metadata. On the contrary they are rather focused on the headings and subtitles of the documents.

4. Make sure to add links within your PDF document

Despite the advice that Jackob Nielsen gave in 2001 to avoid PDFs for onscreen reading, I think that using a PDF can still be a great way to deliver valuable content without affecting the mental flow that every internet surfer has and expects. Inserting links within the documents will ensure the flow and the smooth passing from a PDF document to an ordinary web page.

Therefore, the isolation feeling that PDF have created so far can be removed. It is also strongly recommended to insert links within PDF documents because of other factors; just think when someone sends an email with the PDF – the original source of the document might be lost.

5. Pay attention to the PDF size

It is of vital importance that your PDF should not be 'rich' in size and poor in content. The quality of the PDF documents depends on who you are addressing to. If it is too big, the search engine may abandon the PDFs even before accessing its content.

Keeping the PDF document at a reasonable size can be achieved by selectingAdvanced>PDF Optimizer to ‘right-size’ the document. Also if you are rather interested in a certain page of the document to be seen by visitors, you can enable the ‘Optimize for Fast Web View’ option in the Preferences and General Settings panel.

6. Avoid excessive colors and ‘extravagant’ fonts

Maybe you don’t think this is important, but fonts and colors can slow down the ‘work’ of search engines. Therefore, try to stick to fonts as readable as possible, and convert your text to Grayscale.

I found in this article, called Base 14 Fonts the main 14 fonts which are recommended for usage in PDFs:

• Times (v3) or Times New Roman PS MT (v4.x) - 4 versions
• Helvetica (v3) or Arial MT (v4.x) - 4 versions
• Courier - 4 versions
• Symbol
• Zapf Dingbats

7. Specify the reading order

The third tip revolved around specifying PDF properties. Well, that is not enough. Sometimes, search engines might fail to read the description you gave. Nowadays even more important than the title or the description is specifying the search engine reading order like in the print screen below.

Similar to any web page, even PDFs do have a reading order. Your priority should be making valuable content visible first. You can do that by accessing Advanced>Accessibility>Touch Up Reading Order of Adobe Professional (in this case Adobe Professional 7.0). The main idea is to use the Touch Up Reading Order tool to manage what the search engine will read first.

8. Enable the PDF for fast web view

The Fast Web allows you to render PDF files more quickly. Instead of waiting for the whole PDF to download, the Fast Web option allows the PDF to be rendered a page at a time. You can check whether your PDF has Fast Web View enabled or not by checking the document properties.

Enabling this option is not particularly important in terms of SEO, but more in terms of ensuring that impatient web searchers don’t abandon PDFs before even getting the chance to know what it is about. Enabling the Fast Web View can be done by accessing Preferences>General Settings panel in Adobe Acrobat.

I recommend scanning this article also: What you don’t know about optimizing PDFs can hurt you with more valuable advice.

To conclude...

As I said right from the beginning, the PDFs` optimization is not as complicated as it sounds, and, by doing this, you improve the visibility of the content of your website, therefore it’s for sure a well spent time. SEO for PDFs is important; it does not depend on the type of PDF that is being published, whether it is a research report or a simple article. In the first case, not only will you gain popularity because of the content of the report, but also because of the optimization strategy. So good luck with your PDF optimization!