PDF Files - Your Undiscovered Gold Mine

By Ralph Tegtmeier
Posted Friday, October 22, 2004

It is a well established fact that search engines simply adore (relevant) textual content above anything else. However, in our experience many corporate web sites are at a loss when required to generate search engine optimized content, be it for cloaking, be it for more conventional techniques of optimization.

Yet, quite a few of these companies entertain a plethora of textually rich material which would literally be gobbled up with glee by the search engine spiders. These are typically files in Adobe Acrobat's PDF format featuring manuals, features lists, technical specifications, White Papers, and the like.

Unfortunately, PDF files are not, as a rule, spidered and indexed by any of the major search engines. (The notable exception being - as of fairly recently - Google.) Of course, the PDF format is widely favored because it allows for easy cross system transfer of formatted documents. All the recipient has to do to read them is to download Adobe's free Acrobat Reader program which plugs itself into the major browsers upon installation.

Don't let this material lie around unused search engine wise! Convert it to text format at all costs, set it up as standard web pages with full navigation elements, cross link to these pages from your index page (invisibly, if you must) and submit it to all the search engines. It may actually work wonders for your rankings and the slight loss of formatting and layout offered by the PDF format is more than made up for by enhanced visibility and positioning in the search engine's indexes!

About the Author
Ralph Tegtmeier is the co-founder and principal of fantomaster.com Ltd. (UK) and fantomaster.com GmbH (Belgium), a company specializing in webmasters software development, industrial-strength cloaking and search engine positioning services. You can contact him at mailto:fneditor@fantomaster.com