Before we answer that, let’s see what is going on. Below you can see that when I searched for PDF files on Google’s search engine with the word technology you can see the file I was looking for as the 2^nd result. Where does the title (the first line in purple) come from?

By clicking on the link I get the PDF file shown below. You can see that the title shown in the search engine was taken from the heading on the first page.

 

Google didn’t bother to fill out the title field in the PDF. The title field is shown below.

 

Google can get away with doing this because they are careful about using good headings. Can you also get by without bothering to fill out the title field?

It depends. If you have a good heading then you can skip the title field. However, if the title is a graphic, or if it doesn’t accurately describe the content, or if you are missing keywords you can do one of two things to rectify the situation:

1. Change the heading to reflect the content, add your keywords and make sure the heading is not a graphic
2. Add a title tag to the PDF. This is easily done if you have the proper software (Adobe Acrobat for example)

Tags: Internet Marketing

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 26th, 2007 at 3:38 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.