Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

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Metadata for Compelling Titles

Search results for non-HTML documents can be downright ugly, because the folks who

wrote them never considered how these documents would be presented in the search

engines. For example, take a look at this page of PDF search results for the term

“umpire whistles.”

Look at listings number three and four: T? W? What kind of page titles are

those? That just isn’t going to cut it in the split-second decision world of search results.

Here are possible places that search engines will look for a page title for your

document:

• The document title as specified in

metadata

, which is extra information you

write to describe the document (and is stored in a file’s properties but is not

visible in the body of the document)

• The first 60 or so characters of the document’s text

• The filename

• Any text in the document that you happened to format in a larger font.

Search engines will generally look for metadata first, so defining document meta-

data is the easiest way to improve your listings. In Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft

Office applications, metadata such as Title, Author, and Keywords is very easy to

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