Many member-based organizations post PDFs to their website to create extensive resources for their members and/or site visitors.   Did you know there are ways to use the PDFs to help increase search traffic on your site?

Marketing Sherpa has a great guide called "How to Optimize Your PDFs to Increase Search Traffic."  (Membership required, but you can quickly get a free trial.)  The first tip could be an obstacle for many chambers of commerce, business associations and other not-for-profits - use the proper software.  Yes, it can cost $300-450 for a full version of Acrobat, but I think its well worth it in the flexibility and options you get with it.

Some highlights&tips:

• Add links to you PDF - very easy to do, but few people do it, and use good anchor text in your links.
• Add a company footer - this helps to tie your company to the content
• Save "back" to older versions - makes your PDFs compatible with more people's software, helps your message be seen more easily.
• Add Meta Data (if using Acrobat) – get the keywords you want to be known for in the document

WebLink posts case studies and white papers on technology for member-based organizations, member intelligence and membership management software on our website.  By using some of these techniques, our documents are indexed and quite findable on Google.

Your organization may produce member benefit sheets, advertising (non-dues revenue) rate information, new member sales documents, annual reports or other information that contains keywords you’d like to be found for.  Make sure these documents are optimized for search and are being indexed by the search engines.

There are also some great links at the end of the article to more resources.  Plus, here are a few more links. Some of them are a bit old, but their content still applies.