PDF Files - Your Undiscovered Gold Mine

Ralph Tegtmeier

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