Link building with PDFs
PDFs are an excellent, but under-utilised, option for marketing your web site. One great thing about PDFs is that you have more places than just the WWW to market them. They can be added to your own web site, article sites and even placed on file sharing software. Finally, PDFs don't use the rel=nofollow attribute so you know that links from them count for something.
First of all get your links on them, get them on your web sites and submit to articles sites. If other people nick them for their own web sites then you have free inbound links.
Second, get them out on file sharing software (of course you can also put html files on file sharing software, but who will want to open them?). Some people will find these and visit your website, and you got this traffic without needing to worry about SEO at all. Again there is also a fair chance that someone will 'steal' your content and put the pdfs up on their own website, which will mean more free links. This is a really useful little backdoor, since it gives you traffic without going through any of the usual channels.
Before you do any of this though, your PDFs do need optimising just like html pages. In order to add your links and optimise your PDF you will need some PDF editing software like Adobe Professional.
Adding links in Adobe Professional is straightforward - Go to TOOLS - ADVANCED EDITING - LINK TOOL and select the text you want to link in. Then type your URL in the dialog box.
To optimise your page, you need to go to FILE - DOCUMENT PROPERTIES and give the PDF a title, subject and keywords - this last step will really help, and all too many people neglect to do this, part of the job.
Finally, you need to add some document security so that your links can't be removed or the content tampered with. Go to DOCUMENT - SECURITY - RESTRICT OPENING AND EDITING and choose the security settings you want to use to protect your PDF document.
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2 comments:
Hi Chris,
Very insightful! One question about the internal PDF links -- why do you need to use Adobe Professional to create the links? If, for example, I "Print to PDF" in Word using the Adobe Distiller, will this give different results than manually creating each link?
Thanks!
~Graham
HI Graham,
thanks for passing by. When I first tried it with Distiller the links disappeared and I had to put them in manually. Same with CutePDF. So I ended up just sticking with what I knew worked. If Distiller is working for you, please let me know.
Another thing I haven't sorted out is a way to get some sort of a title attribute in there, but I am looking in to it.
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