PDF content will look good on everyone's screen, unlike web pages where you have to consider various different settings and resolutions.
PDFs are often downloaded to people's desktop and therefore have a longer "shelf life" - they may come across the PDF in the future, but with a web page (even a bookmarked one) they are not likely to accidentally come across it again. They would have to actively go to your site to see the page again.
There are many other "pluses" for PDFs.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying all content should be in PDF. It definitely should not be.
But there is value to a PDF and it has its place within your content and your marketing plans.
There are ways you can make your PDF more search engine friendly to get maximum benefit out of it. Here are some of the steps.
1. Make sure your PDFs are text based. Using images is just fine, but don't make the actual content within your PDF an image.
2. Complete the document properties. Most people are unaware that this is an important step.
The most important property is the Title.
The Title property, if present, typically represents the words that will be displayed as the heading of the search result. It's the equivalent to the html title tag.
If you don't complete the Title property, the search engine is going to generate a title from the PDF's content, and it may not be what you would choose.
3. Use keywords within your content. It's just like a web page, you want good keyword usage.
4. Build links into PDFs. Make sure you include links in your PDFs, and pay attention to the anchor text used. Search engines do recognize these links.
5. Version matters. While search engines do "read" and index PDFs, search engines' capabilities tend to lag new versions of Acrobat. Although Acrobat 8 is out, for now you should save your PDFs as version 1.6 (Acrobat 7) or lower to ensure search engines can index the content.
6. Size does matter. You can "optimize" the size of your file, so it isn't too big and annoying for the engines and users to download. Here's how with the full version of Acrobat: Select Advanced>PDF Optimizer. You may also want to enable the "Optimize for Fast Web View" option in the Preferences>General Settings panel. This allows the PDF to be "loaded" a page at a time, rather than waiting for the whole PDF to download.
10. Tag your PDFs You can also add tags to your PDFs, similar to html tags. Again, with the PDF open and while using the full version of Acrobat, select Advanced>Accessibility>Add Tags to Document.
Consider how PDFs may help your marketing and search efforts and start implementing them following these guidelines.
