To most marketing managers the online presentation company SlideShare is no surprise story. Anyone who has ever Googled anything has likely seen a search result for SlideShare and furthermore, likely clicked on it. SlideShare is a great tool for SEO and also an efficient way to generate more views on your content.
The benefit for marketers all over the world is that SlideShare is also inherently SEO-friendly, making the ability to create content that ranks or is highly trafficked within reach. The secret behind this is SlideShare’s ability to index content and transcribe it for easy search engine discovery.
Here are four ways to boost your SEO with SlideShare.
1. Create Presentations Based on Your Keywords
If your company spends a lot of time creating SEO-friendly content for your website or blog you probably already understand the value of placing keywords in your headlines and throughout your text. In this same regard SlideShare presentations can be used to help you come up in search for your keywords. In addition to creating content that provides value to your end reader you will also do well to create content that makes good use of your keywords throughout. This should also entail creating presentations that are content rich and jammed packed with information.
This does not mean merely creating content for the sake of creating content and overstuffing it with keywords. It means providing a well thought out train of thoughts and educational, informational or entertaining information. In addition to providing exceptional user-value as your first objective you will also simultaneously be giving the search engines more information to index and therefore increasing your ability to rank.
2. Optimizing Your Presentations
In addition to creating great content that is tastefully littered with your most important keywords there are some other SEO tactics that you should be aware of on SlideShare:
- SEO-friendly titles: Just like in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), your titles in SlideShare should be limited to about 70 characters. Reason being the titles of your presentations will be the same titles that appear in the SERPs. Make good use of your keywords in the titles.
- Click-worthy descriptions: SlideShare gives you the opportunity to create descriptions for your presentations and this should not be an overlooked aspect of your ability to rank. Write something that compels users to click through to your presentation but also include (non-stuffed) keywords to help to rank for those terms.
- Add tags: Like on Pinterest, SlideShare gives you the opportunity to add tags to your presentations so that they can come up in on-site searches. With the ability to add up to 20 tags per presentation make sure you take advantage of the opportunity to rank on this highly trafficked website.
The above graphic illustrates the use of an effective title as well as a compelling description. Creator Maps of World could have made better use of the description, elaborating more on the presentation’s contents and showcasing the value of why viewers should click-through.
3. Compounding Your Reach
Another really cool feature SlideShare provides is the ability to embed your presentations onto sites or social networks. In addition to creating a brief blog or webpage that discusses the contents of your presentation (and embedding it there), reach out to other social media thought leaders and suggest that they embed the presentation on their sites.
You can also share your presentations through social media in the efforts that others will reshare or link to them.
4. Rinse and Repeat
At the time of this post SlideShare has a PageRank of eight, meaning there is a huge chance that anything published there will have more opportunity of getting views than on your website alone. For this reason we recommend that you don’t stop with just one presentation; create multiple SlideShare presentations that provide value to your readers and adhere to the above guidelines for SEO.
Using SlideShare to Your Advantage
You can perform simple searches on SlideShare to determine what presentations have already been created or the ones where you can potentially rank more easily. Spend your time creating presentations that are unique in content or that provide more value than what already exists. Most importantly, create content that matters to your readers and build awareness by sharing it with them throughout your social channels.
