A very effective way of producing an online catalog that your customers can print out is to add it to your website as a pdf file. Search engines read and catalog a pdf file just like they do web pages. I discussed an easy and free way to create a pdf file in a previous post. But once you have created it, do you know how to optimize it so that the search engines can find it?
If not, here are some tips:
- Don’t scan your document as an image file and then save it as a PDF. When you do this the PDF is an image and there is no text for the search engines to read.
- Save it as a text file
- Optimize the text in the PDF just as if you were optimizing a web page, including important keywords and phrase in the title, tags, and within the body of the text.
- Include keywords in the title of your file. Different programs have different ways that you can modify a document’s title. If you are using Acrobat,you can usually modify the Document’s title by choosing “File” in the toolbar, then choosing “Properties”, and modify’s the “Title” on the Description Tab.
- Use the title of the PDF file as your link from wherever you are linking to it within your website.
- Put the most important text near the beginning of your PDF
- Include an “active” link to your website url within the PDF file
- To create the smallest possible PDFs for the Web minimize the number of fonts and bitmapped images. If you have the capability, use vector images.
- Use common fonts. Every font you add can increase the file size by up to 40 KB