Mark Stephens Mark has been working with Java and PDF since 1999 and is a big NetBeans fan. He enjoys speaking at conferences. He has an MA in Medieval History and a passion for reading.

Why convert PDF magazines to HTML5? – Part 2. SEO and the long tail

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In my first article, I mentioned the importance of SEO. Search Engine Optimisation is about getting the right keywords so that your website gets found. And in order to be found, your website needs to have lots of good material on it, which people want to read, and to be easily scannable by the search engines such as Google. It also needs to be on your site! As I said last time, if you are putting your content on someone else’s site, you are doing them (but not necessarily yourself) a big favour. If you put your magazines on your website as HTML5 you are doing yourself the favour.

Of course, you may not want to put your latest magazines on the web and make them accessible to Google – if you are trying to sell your magazines, you only want people to access them who have paid – this is very easy to ensure in HTML5. But you would like to attract people to your site – so how can you achieve this?

There is another trick you could use. The term long-tail was popularised by Chris Anderson to refer to the fact that lots of small items together could add up to a substantial amount. Amazon makes a fortune from small numbers of sales of books that bookshops cannot risk selling. But sell 5 copies of something a million times and that is a lot of books (and money!).

If you have a magazine on kittens/cars/etc, you probably have a lot of back issues containing many articles which are still relevant, well-written and full of all the right keywords. So what effect do you think turning those into HTML5 pages for the website while still limiting access to the new material would have on the way Google and other search engines see you?

Why not try some sample copies with our free online PDF to HTML5 converter (which gives you the HTML5 version to put on your own website)?

This article is part of a series where we talk about the advantages of publishing your PDF magazines online as HTML5. Visit the index and see more advantages.



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Mark Stephens Mark has been working with Java and PDF since 1999 and is a big NetBeans fan. He enjoys speaking at conferences. He has an MA in Medieval History and a passion for reading.

2 Replies to “Why convert PDF magazines to HTML5? – Part 2.…”

    1. Google can and does crawl and index content generated by our converter. Here’s a search for some text which is on page 36 of the initial demo – I see that we are the 6th result (using Chrome’s incognito mode):

      https://www.google.co.uk/search?tbm=bks&hl=en&q=While+guidelines+targeting+determines+which+households+are+eligible+for+a+program%2C+benefits+targeting+determines+whether+or+not+program+participants+all+receive+the+same+level+of+benefits#hl=en&q=For+child+care+homes+participating+in+the+Child+and+Adult+Care+Food+Program+(CACFP)%2C+Congress+replaced+a+single-rate+reimbursement

      I don’t expect the other demos on this page to be indexed due to the way they are inserted dynamically on button clicks. For best SEO, I would not recommend for our customers to dynamically insert iframes in this way. We do not need the content of our demo PDFs to be indexed which is why we have opted for a mechanism that favours user experience over SEO on this page.

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