vital marketing

It’s easy to link to a PDF document from an email or HTML page—just use a standard HTML hyperlink. For example, to link to the October 2007 issue of Connections Magazine (PDF), include this URL address:
http://www.connectionsmagazine.com/issues/7/10.pdf

But what if you want to link directly to my article, “Creating a Virtual Contact Center,” that begins on page 29?

By appending the tag, “#page=pagenumber” to any PDF URL, your browser will open the PDF file and position it on the specified page number.

So for our example, you can direct readers to the article on page 29 with this URL:
http://www.connectionsmagazine.com/issues/7/10.pdf#page=29

Adding the “#page=” tag eliminates the manual PDF-navigation effort for your audience. Not only will they appreciate the time saver, they’re more likely to find and read the targeted content.

You’ve probably noticed when searching with Google, often PDFs come up in the search results. That’s because Google indexes PDF files, and PDFs represent a large volume of the content on the web.

However, most people don’t think about optimizing their PDFs for the search engines. That’s unfortunate because it’s easy to optimize your PDFs for Google indexing and searching.

First, make sure you include TITLE, DESCRIPTION and KEYWORDs attributes in your PDF file. You can also add the AUTHOR and other fields as desired—but TITLE is essential!

You can supply these attributes (tags) with Adobe or other tools that you use to create the PDF. Or you can always modify these attributes in existing PDFs by using a freeware utility like PDF Info.

Keep in mind that the TITLE field is what Google uses as the heading in its search results. If you don’t have a TITLE, then it will just display the first chunk of text in encounters in the PDF document—which is often not ideal. So always include a useful TITLE tag.

Also if you want a search engine to find your content based on keywords or key phrases, be sure you include those terms in prominent locations in your PDF document, such as the page titles and table of contents.

For more information on PDF files and SEO, here are a couple of useful links on Adobe’s site:

• Offer search tools a helping hand
• Make your PDFs work well with Google (and other search engines)