Most search engines will index the popular file formats like Word and PDF. However, in many cases, you will need to do special work to ensure that a particular file type is search-engine friendly. For many years, I have described this scenario to audiences: “Imagine you are on the Web, and you click on a link, a link that you think will bring you to an ordinary webpage. All of sudden, you are downloading a PDF. Do you feel excited?” Whether they are in Seattle, Sydney, or Singapore, very few feel excited; most feel annoyed.
People don’t like wasting time on the Web. PDFs take more time to download than normal HTML pages. Many organizations use the PDF as a quick fix for their content – it’s easier and quicker to put up a PDF than to publish the content properly in HTML. So, PDF often reflects a get-print-content-up-on-the-website-as-quickly-andcheaply- as-possible approach. Another reason many people don’t like PDFs is that the text is very hard to read on the screen, almost forcing you to print it out or risk a headache. PDFs are useful for the following:
•Long documents (1,000 words or more), as most people who need to read long documents prefer to print them out.
•Documents that have complicated layouts (lots of diagrams, forms, etc.).
From a search engine optimization point of view, make sure PDFs – and other files – have appropriate title and description tags. If you have a long PDF, create a webpage with a summary in HTML. This serves two purposes:
1. It will improve the search indexability of the PDF.
2. It allows people to make the decision whether they should download the PDF or not. (Always make it explicitly clear that the link is to a PDF and also tell the reader what size the PDF is. For example, “2005 annual report (PDF 456 KB).”) Make sure you keep the size of your PDFs as small as possible. I have come across 2.5 MB PDFs that could easily have been 250 KB. (Save time and you make your reader happy.)