"Heading 1" vs. "Title" Style for SEO

[BlueLinkERP]

I think there is some confusion. I am talking about using Word to create a PDF to be placed on our site. The PDFs rank fairly well but I want to be sure we are optimizing the titles with proper tags if possible.

Does that make more sense now?

So basically my question is: is there a way to define a line of text in a PDF / word doc to indicate to Google that it is the "h1" tag on the page and give it greater emphasis?

[BlueLinkERP]

Please see my response to Jesse. Hopefully I made things clear

[jesse-landry]

Yes this does make more sense but now I have to tell you how anti-PDF I am.

I absolutely hate PDFs. Sorry. Not trying to be rude and I'm sure you have your reasons, but is there anyway you can make this a webpage instead? What are the reasons, if you don't mind me asking.

Optimizing a PDF is not something I can advise you on but I can tell you that they don't work with things like H1 tags and hypertext markup...

[BlueLinkERP]

I've been using PDFs because it is the way we want to make downloadable content available for our users. In the past I created webpage versions of our content as well but I am worried about duplicate content issues.

The optimal scenario would be to have both the PDF and webpage but canonicalize the PDF to the page. Is that possible? Right now, I am only aware of the ability to pass canonicalization to the PDF from a webpage, not the other way around.

[Kara.Wallace]

Ah! I see what you are saying.

No. The "title" style will not help you; however, H1-H6 in a PDF will still help you, along with the file name.

You can specify the Title, Author, and Subject on the Description tab under File > Properties in Acrobat.

That should help you optimize your PDF.

Mike

[Kara.Wallace]

Here is some additional great info on optimizing PDFs:

http://moz.com/ugc/how-to-optimize-pdf-documents-for-search

[BlueLinkERP]

Thanks for the info! However, I'm still trying to figure out the best way to offer both web content as well as PDFs. Is there a way to offer a downloadable PDF but canonicalize it to the web content to avoid duplicate content issues?

[Kara.Wallace]

This article from Google Webmasters Central should solve it for you, Supporting Rel Canonical HTTP Headers

Mike

[BlueLinkERP]

Beauty. Thanks Mike.

[Kara.Wallace]

No problem.