Although most experts would recommend placing content on the web in html form, PDFs still play a vital role, especially in B2B marketing. Research (and our own experience as a B2B marketing firm) has sown that some of the content most sought by business purchasers are case studies, whitepapers, and technical articles—and PDFs are a great vehicle for these content-heavy B2B marketing pieces. Business purchasers specifically looking for this type of information can narrow their search to look exclusively for PDFs using the advance search options of search engines like Google and Yahoo.

The source documents from which PDFs are created are often very expensive to write and design (e.g., brochures, product sheets, etc.) Yet, when it comes to making a PDF, B2B marketers invest a couple minutes to convert such documents into a PDF and post it. What a waste! If you’re going to make a significant investment in a printed piece, why wouldn’t spend even an hour to help ensure your prospects can find it?

Some tips on optimizing your PDF:

• Make sure you create text-based PDFs
• Specify document properties for the PDF
• Keep the content of the PDF focused
• Specify the reading order
• Influence meta descriptions
• Tag your PDFs
• Build links into PDFs
• Verify your links
• Save the PDF as an accessible version
• Optimize the file size for search
• Enable your PDFs for fast web view
• Watch where you place PDFs on your site
• Use keyword-rich anchor text to link to PDFs
• Don’t do anything in a PDF that you wouldn’t do in a web page
• Recheck things before you post the PDF