Document Scanning for Content

Document scanning is about converting your documents into forms that are stored electronically to save space. However,a secondary reason why you might want to consider document scanning is as  source of content for your website that can be spidered and indexed. While the opportunities for major keywords may not be there. It can be a useful way of obtaining long-tail searches especially for technical specifications, user manuals and other documents which are very detailed and specific. The technique is less useful if there are already copies of the information online as they will be flagged as duplicate content.

One of the most popular ways of archiving this information online is to store   it is as  PDF documents. These documents can be viewed in most browsers and are spidered by the most popular search engines.

When scanning the documents to be placed online it is important to use optical character recognition software so that the text is searchable rather than create just a scanned  image of the document. Google has its own facility to convert pdf documents into text but using OCR reduces the memory requirements for storage of the document.

In older versions of  Adobe Acrobat, this can be achieved by selecting the paper scan option from Document>Paper Capture> Start Paper capture. In Adobe Acrobat 9, I believe there is a plugin which allows the same feature.

If the initial scan was not very good, the OCR version may have some garbled words, but these can be found by selecting Document > Paper Capture and select “Find first OCR suspect” or “Find all OCR suspects.” This identifies characters that the OCR engine had problems with, and gives you a chance to correct the text.