Search Engines index non-HTML documents like Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF), Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Powerpoint, and Rich Text Format (RTF.)

You can either not have the documents on your site or you can optimize them. If you choose to optimize these non-HTML file formats, treat them just like they are another page on your website.

The main thing you will want to remember is to make sure these non-HTML documents have readable text.

Here are some key points to keep in mind when optimizing a PDF document:

• Link your PDF to the sitemap the same way you would a web page.
• The PDF should contain your target keywords.
• Include your target keywords in the title of your PDF document.
• The anchor text to the PDF should contain keywords. Anchor text is the text that a visitor to a website sees as a link.
• Think about breaking the PDF into smaller sections, especially if it is large and has various themes.
• PDF files should be used sparingly. If you have a large PDF, minimize the size.
• Search engines typically will only index the first 1000 or so words of a large PDF file.

If you limit access to your PDF and if the PDF is large, the search engines can not index the PDF document and you will not be able to use the information in the PDF for ranking purposes.