How to optimise Word documents (.doc)

You may be aware that at times when you search for something in Google, it is not always websites that appear in the results.

You may also have seen any of the following:

• YouTube videos
• Products from Google’s product search
• Images
• PDF files
• .doc files

Now there are many methods to optimise for the different items above. Today, I’m going to touch on how you can optimise a .doc file. Before doing anything, it’s important to note that Google CAN read .doc files and what is contained in them.

Therefore, the number one tip would be to optimise the internal structure of the file using headings and bold text etc. (Of course mentioning the keywords a few times in the file would help.)

Is that it? Well, no. I will now go a bit deeper and mention something that isn’t known to many people out there. Microsoft Word actually allows you to set certain meta data for your document. These are:

• Author
• Title
• Subject
• Keywords
• Category
• Status
• Comments

Optimising all of these fields will certainly help with regards to your rankings for a document. How do you do this? You need to edit the “properties” of the document. This is a screenshot of how you would do this in Word 2007:

Finally, as usual, having some good quality backlinks pointing directly to the document file will help.

Ahmed Bhula
Natural SEO Programmer

P.S. The final sentence above may raise a question in your mind. Can files gather PageRank if they have lots of links pointing to them? Well, I’ll leave that for you to answer and I may post on this again in the future.