Adobe’s PDF (Portable Document Format) is a convenient format for making any document universally viewable, and an especially useful format for putting content into your website
Newsletters, brochures, annual reports etc. in fact anything you can print or scan you can turn into a PDF document and have in your website.
Visitors to your site can download the free PDF viewer from Adobe (and others) to have your document faithful represented on their browser independent of operating system and browser differences.
Of course you need to link the PDF to your menu or content so visitors and search engines can reach it. Search engines? Yes! They treat a PDF as if it’s another page in your website.
PDFs are a great way to increase the amount of content on a key subject to support search marketing efforts, not to mention the benefit of providing additional sales and product information etc that prospective clients can read to support their decision to purchase from you.
Search engines can’t see inside a PDF
This is an urban myth about PDFs that we really need to bust.
Google has been indexing text content and metatags inside PDFs since 2001
Google cant read images inside PDFs
Another myth busted. In fact in Oct 2008 Google announced that they could OCR (Optical Character Recognition) PDF images. That means they can turn images inside of PDFs into indexable text.
Where are your PDFs ?
Use this Google search to find PDF documents in your website:
inurl:pdf
for example inurl:pdf www.succinctideas.com.au
The INURL search operator tells Google to restrict search results to a particular document type. Read more about Google’s inurl: search operator
Statics show that visitors will more readily open another page in your website rather than open a PDF so keep a balance of content types.
So PDFs really are quite genuine content, engaging sales visitors and search engines!
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