PDF, of course, is the portable document format made famous by Adobe Corporation. Many people don’t know that’s what PDF stands for. A lot of people want to educate themselves on search engine optimization, and they’re looking for easy, even free, ways to do so. One of their more common searches is for SEO books in PDF format.
Why might they want to find SEO books in PDF? Well, PDF SEO books mean, first and foremost, that they can be read on the computer. This means that the links that are embedded in the PDF document should be clickable, and one can therefore easily hop from the book to recommended resources. In my own book on SEO, for example, the PDF format uses this in great order. I point out words to many, many tools and resources on SEO, and make those links clickable in the book. In addition, I make the links to YouTube videos on SEO as well.
A second reason for looking for SEO books in PDF format is to look for free SEO books. On this account, I am somewhat more skeptical. As an author, it drives me a bit nuts that people look for free information. Not that I am against free. Far from it, as I maintain that the largest compendium of free SEO tools, my SEO Toolbook. However, you get what you pay for! Or at least usually. Most of the free SEO tools in the Toolbook are teaser tools that are used to promote a more full version of the tool, or are used as a marketing tactic for an SEO company to market their services. This does not mean that the free SEO tools are bad, it just means that they are more abbreviated than the complete, paid version.
Good Information Can’t Be Free, Even on SEO, Even in PDF
However, when we get to information it self, free is actually quite vicious. A lot of the free information available on the Internet in terms of SEO comes from the blogosphere. It doesn’t take much to write a blog post – after all, this blog post is taking me all of 20 minutes. It also doesn’t take much to have a blog inserted in even some of the more prestigious journals on SEO. However, a lot of this free information is pretty terrible. You get what you pay for.
Other PDF SEO books are simply marketing materials that are created as Link bait, or click bait, to capture inbound leads. Many unscrupulous SEO companies produce this type of PDF content, and its sole purpose is to capture your email. The information contained inside of the book is either extremely basic, in the best case, or in the worst case, is misleading or flat out wrong.
All of these reasons are why in the SEO Fitness Workbook 2016 we publish the book on Amazon in print format, on Amazon in Kindle format, and give the book to participants in our paid SEO training classes. We do not give the book away for free, even in PDF format. It costs money and time to produce the book, and therefore, we cannot simply give it away for free. However, the book is very reasonably priced, and if you sign up for our email mailing list, we generally alert our readership when a low cost or even free promotions are available during the early publication of the book when we are keen to get reviews.