If you are like me, you will inadvertantly be surfing along, click a link, then watch as everything grinds to a halt because that link you just clicked was actually linked to a PDF file. And worse, your Adobe Acrobat or Reader takes its sweet time as it loads all the extranous features, checks for updates, then lags horribly as Internet Explorer tries to crunch all 128 pages of PDF goodness it just loaded up.

That said, PDFs definitely have their place on the web… just be very careful about how you place them, so your visitors don’t feel the desire to leap through their computer screen and over to yours and strangle you for that poor placed PDF you just launched at them.

Label links as PDFs
You may think that people will actually notice when they mouse over the link and see the .pdf extension in their status bar. Well think again. Always ALWAYS label that link with some kind of notation that screams to people “Hey! Heads up! This is a PDF file!” That way people get the opportunity to save it to their hard drive before viewing, which cuts down the scrolling time considerably. I would argue that this is the most important usability tip for PDF files, but something a large number of websites just don’t do.

Give people some choices
Is the PDF only a page or two? Why not save the file also as an image, so people have the choice to view it as an image or a PDF. Or offer it in a Word or Excel document if applicable. There are some people who despise PDFs so much that they don’t even have Adobe Reader Installed on their computer. If you are concerned about theft, keep in mind that anyone can turn a PDF document into a Word document quite easily.

What the heck is a PDF and where do I get this reader thing?
And speaking of the Adobe Reader uninitiated types, don’t forget to include a link to Adobe Reader. And if your PDF needs to be opened in the latest (and supposedly greatest) version of Adobe, never assume that everyone has installed or upgraded their reader to the most recent version. While your SEO help site can probably get away with not having a link to reader, your site on collecting hockey jerseys probably cannot.

Help!
Are you serving up a 200 page Acrobat document? Keep in mind that most people don’t have a brand new computer with 4 GB of RAM and loading it through Firefox. So hit up a friend’s house with a far less powerful computer and click your PDF link and see what happens. Yep, it would appear your site crashes their browser… if it doesn’t actually crash it. This is because it takes so long to load a 200 page PDF file in an older and slower computer. So give instructions on how to save it to a hard drive, even being as bold as labelling part of the link as “RIGHT click to download this PDF”. This will save you the headache of the inevitable emails consisting of “I want to download your Really Cool PDF but it keeps crashing my browser”. Trust me, they will come, and they can come for PDFs with a smaller number of pages, especially those that make heavy use of varied fonts and images.

Link to a specific page within a PDF document
Want to highlight a certain page in a multiple page PDF document? You can link to a specific page within the PDF by using “http://www.example.com/document.pdf#page=3″ format, similar to how we link to a specific part of a webpage. Otherwise, the usual first page will show.

Link within the PDF too
Did you know PDF files show as backlinks when there is a link to your site within the document? Definitely use the web links tool in Acrobat to ensure all your URLs turn into links. And want to link keywords to specific webpages? You can do this too by selecting Tools then Link Tools. Highlight the text you want linked, select Link Action then Open a Web Page and enter the URL you want those keywords linked to. So yes, this does mean that all three major search engines index PDF files, as well as those imbedded backlinks.

Optimize your PDF
The past couple of years, Adobe Acrobat (full version) gives users the tools to self-otpimize PDFs when you create or edit them. So before you do your final save and upload it to your server for visitors. With the document open in Acrobat, select Edit, then Preferences. Select General on the left, then select “Save as Optimizes for Fast Web View”, click OK. Then save as usual. You can also reduce the size of your PDF by reducing the compatibility on it (such as the PDF only being compatible with the latest version and the one previous) however proceed with caution unless your site is in a high tech space, because most people who download Adobe Reader rarely upgrade it, so you could easily have people using versions 4 or 5 (or older!) and your PDF will not load or will load with errors in the versions your PDF is not compatible with.

Next time you decide to upload a PDF to your server, ensure that you are following these usability tips so that you aren’t alienating your visitors by throwing up PDF roadblocks in their way. And it is probably not a bad idea to go back and see how your sites are handling PDFs that are already in place… there are many, many websites out there that don’t follow many (or any!) of these rules!

Don't miss a single post! Subscribe to my RSS feed

Press my buttons!

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Written on September 14, 2007 at 6:31 am and filed under Search Engine Optimization, Usability. You can make a comment, or trackback from your own site.