Hey Industrial Manufacturer's, Rep's and Distributor's: Consider Web SEO When designing Your Literature!

Bad Web PDF SEO (click for larger)

Just about every company we deal with makes the same mistake with their online literature. SEO titles and meta information is commonly overlooked.

Literature is always done on some form of desktop publisher (Word, InDesign, Quark) and generally always done by people with print publishing backgrounds (not web design). The nicely designed brochures, line cards, and engineering documents are then sent to printers for handing out, and outputted to PDF versions for the Web.

The problem arises during the conversion to PDF from the desktop publishing software. These software packages almost always default the creator's file name as the "meta title" of the new PDF, leaving an often cryptic and useless SEO document title.  For instance, seeing a document name like "Jan 2017 Line Card" or Jan 2017 Eng Doc", or worse yet seeing "Doc.01012017.3425" is of no value at all for Web indexing.

Good Web PDF SEO (click for larger)

While Google and Bing index a PDF's full content, adding a good title, description, author, and copyright to these documents is very important for SEO.

Creators of literature need to be aware of these items before and during their design, and either input them to the right fields in the desktop publishing software, or later edit them in Adobe Acrobat.

Recommendations for good SEO for Web literature:

1. Start off with a good SEO title for the document including the company name and maybe even good search terms. Ex: "Line Card Jan 20, 2017" should be something like "ACME-Rep-Company-New-York-New-Jersey-Process-Control-Line-Card-1-20-2017"
2. Start off with a good SEO description for the literature. Ex: "ACME Flowmeter provides more accurate control in low flow applications". 
3. Make the company the author of the document.
4. Assign a copyright statement referencing the company, such as "All rights reserved ACME Widget Company".

These small steps during the creation of the PDF will payoff in much better search results for your products and company brand.

To discuss in more detail, email info@cms4i.com and we'll start a dialog.