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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)

This week InformationWeek reports that Adobe announced their new ‘Searchable SWF technology.” They will be distributing a “search-engine optimized” version of Flash Player to Google and Yahoo.

“When a search spider hits an SWF Flash file, the special Flash Player will start up. This Flash Player will navigate every state of Flash files like a virtual user would, finding and helping the search engines index text and links along the way and searching through otherwise unlinked files that the Flash file points to.”

No doubt this will impact Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) once Google and Yahoo start indexing all the flash-only sites that have so far been invisible to search spiders. However, there are still serious limitations—some that will be annoying to web users—so there’s still no reason to race to Flash as a primary web site development tool.

“Still, only text and links will be searchable. Graphics and video, including FLV files, still won’t be able to be indexed properly, and there’s no capability to search and index metadata embedded in Flash files (even though, Adobe says, SWF and FLV files have metadata fields) or to allow people to link to specific content within a Flash file in order to make search results more relevant. Also, when someone clicks on a search result, they’ll be taken to the beginning of a Flash file and will have to navigate their way to the content they are seeking.”

Here is another article titled, “Caution urged following Google Flash changes” that outlines a few additional concerns.