If you’ve heard that PDF files can’t be crawled, listed or rank well on search engines you should know that simply isn’t true. It is a common misconception, but the fact of the matter is that PDFs can actually rank quite well on search engines – provided their SEO is good.
Assuming you intend to publish PDF files on your website, there are a few tips in particular that could help improve their SEO by leaps and bounds:
Make sure the filename is descriptive
10 Tips to Make Your PDFs SEO Friendly
Just like HTML webpages, images, and other files that you publish on your website – it is best if your PDF files use descriptive filenames. If you want you could use the title as the filename, assuming it has the main keyword that you want to rank on in it.
Just remember to replace any spaces with dashes for the filename. Generally dashes (-) work better than underscores (_) as search engines will interpret them as spaces.
Fill out all the document properties
Google: We index PDF’s just like any other webpage
One of the advantages of PDF documents is that they have various properties including a title, description, author, keywords, and other fields. As you may notice these properties mimic the tags that HTML pages use, and are relevant to search engines.
The most important fields are definitely the title and description as search engines will use both for their listings. That being said you should make it a point to fill out all of the document properties that are available, to provide more context for search engines.
Add alternative text to images
14 Important Image SEO Tips You Need to Know
Another interesting feature of PDFs is the fact that you can add alternative text to images – just the same way you would with regular webpages. Adding alternative text will give search engines a way to contextualize the images in your PDFs, and determine their relevance.
As far as possible you should make it a point to add alternative text to every image in your PDF. For images that are relevant, you should also place keywords in the alternative text itself.
The one thing that you may have noticed is the fact that there are a lot of similarities between PDFs and HTML webpages. In fact when you boil it down the SEO for both is really very similar – just with a few differences that separate the two.
Assuming you are going to be publishing PDF documents on your website however, you are likely to need a way to manage and edit them. At first it may seem like your options are pretty thin, which is why you should try Movavi PDF Editor. Although it is a simple PDF editor, it has lots of features that will prove useful in helping you to alter your documents.
If you want you could use Movavi PDF Editor as a PDF joiner, or to add, remove, rotate, or rearrange pages in a PDF. It can add images to PDFs too, and has several other useful features. With its help coupled with the SEO tips listed above, you should have no trouble publishing PDF documents online and getting them to rank well on search engines too.