My first post here and hoping to get some useful insight and feedback. I'm working on a redesign project (UX & IA) for a local gov't client with a large amount of PDF documents. One of the project requirements is adding search to facilitate users finding these PDFs easier. Here are a few steps I'm already taking:
Identifying and transitioning key PDFs to HTML pages for better search indexing. The balance of the other PDFs I'm not bothering with since G.A data tells me there's little to no traffic therefore no user value to warrant HTML.
PDFs currently live in a document repository as part of the global nav. Again GA tells me there's not much traffic to this section so I'm moving the most important PDFs from this category and filtering them into contextually relevant parent categories across the site for better user discovery and findability
PDFs are not sorted in any logical way currently (ie: alpha, numeric, date/year etc..) I plan on creating groupings of similar PDFs using clear understandble labelling using contextual vocabulary.
My question is, to facilitate the search function returning the best/accurate results I'm assuming we'll need to set up a logical meta tag system in the CMS.
A. Does it make sense to first filter out any R.O.T (site wide) so only the most relevant content is surfaced up in a users search query?
B. Do my above 3 steps make sense and am I missing anything crucial here?
Thanks in advance -gary