One of my clients asked me about the benefits of SlideShare and SEO. I decided to poke around online and see what I could find and how people are using this social media site that appears to be targeted to businesses (hence the presentation part).
I found this informative, introductory article for the new Slidesharers out there. It touches on relatively easy and basic SEO techniques for optimizing each presentation (tagging, titles, etc). SocialSEO also gave us some creative, out-side-of-the-box ideas on how to create more presentations:
Explain a complex business process that could use a few visual aids
Create “how to” tutorials
Give a sales presentation
Show off pictures from an event
Breathe some life to case studies
Bring existing presentations to the web
Repurpose old articles by turning the main points into a presentation
Our Charlotte SEO company is working to help make our clients more visible online. Increasingly important, companies need to build their social community by engaging customers, becoming resilient to negative feedback and implementing the ’sharing’ factor. Sharing presentations ( like on SlideShare), coupons on Google Places, asking for feedback on Facebook and connecting Twitter followers with popular news is eminent in the realm of today’s social media marketing.
On Tuesday, Google Local Business Center became Google Places.
Google Places exists to help local businesses reach local customers. Currently, Google reports that about 4 million businesses have already claimed their virtual dot on the map. Also, Google reports that one in five searches relate to location. Business owners partner with Google Search to bring in more site traffic and business by using old features with new ones. Familiar features include directions, hours of operation, uploaded photos, customer reviews, coupons and real-time updates.
And the drum-roll for Google Places’ new features…
1) Service Areas:
2) Advertising Program: For $25 a month, business can add ‘flare’ to their listing on Google.com and Google Maps with Tags.
3) Free Photo Shoot: Request to get Google to snapshot your Google Business photos. These pics will supplement those under your current photo section on your Places page.
4) Customized QR Codes: What is a QR Code? A QR Code is a two-dimensional bar code, or a matrix code that stands for ‘quick-response’. Mobile phones can quickly read this code with its camera. To see how QR code and how to use, please view the video below.
If you haven’t heard about Google Caffeine yet, just know that it is a new system in which Google will be indexing pages. With the vast popularity of social networking sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, Google has decided to place more emphasis on these sites in their search results. Don’t worry, it will not be officially implemented until after the holiday season, so you do have time to prepare.
Matt Cutts (Google Mastermind Employee) recently discussed some of the new features you will notice (and may not notice) with the revised search engine…
To begin, if you are a business, and are looking to boost rankings in Google, you have got to have presence on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Google will start listing these sites at the top of search results. Even live ‘tweets’ will be included in the search results! Sounds crazy, but that’s the direction the search world is heading.
Google will also be rewarding those sites that load extremely fast. For those individuals who have visited a site, only to sit and wait a couple moments for the page to load will no longer have to worry about this issue.
For those companies who are thinking “well, how do I know how fast my page is loading”, I have a tool to help you out… Please go to: www.code.google.com/speed and insert your URL. The results will speak for themselves.
With search engines constantly evolving, our team at ebasedEVOLUTION tries to stay on top of all current trends.
Recently, we are noticing a great way to have your site more visible in the rankings is to add your website to the local directories. Popular local directories include Yahoo, Google, and Bing.
However, depending on your location, there are plenty of other local resources available. To find them, simply search for “local directory”, or look at other local websites (local newspapers, local magazines, etc.)
Having your site listing in these directories will make it more likely to appear in the “Local Search Results” for search engines. These local search results typically appear before all other organic rankings in the search engine. On Google & Yahoo, there will typically be a map included in the results, which I find to be very useful
Other key things that I personally like to add in these local business results are images and videos. The reasoning behind it can best be explained by the age-old saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words”. Additionally, information such as hours of operation and payment methods accepted can be very beneficial to your audience.
For more internet marketing tips, please visit our website, or contact one of our analysts.
Last week our team of analysts sat down for a meeting on link building. Not any link building, but specifically directory link building.
Our link building efforts have always been about the quality of the link, not mass quantity, which is why our efforts have always maintained manual link building efforts.
In the meeting we went over everything dealing with how and what to look for when hunting down that perfect directory. A few things we discussed involved making sure there is quality in the directories used. Directories come in many shapes, sizes and junk! Our job is to weed out the junk directories from the quality directories that will benefit our clients. Some negatives to look for:
- Paid advertising clutter. Seeing this is a red flag and gives a little light into the meaning behind the directory.
- Outbound linking. All directories handle this differently and determining how this is done for each makes a huge impact. Some directories do not allow direct outbound links which may change focus to a quality listing for traffic instead of link building.
- Value. Is the directory your using brand new, been around years like DMOZ or have some middle of the road value? Using a new directory is not all bad considering some of the things discussed above. With that being said, keep in mind that newer directories almost always have less value then an older directory. This might be fine for you looking into the future of that directory and wanting to be a part of that.
These are a few key factors when we work on our directory link building for clients. Directories play a huge roll in link building, but does not weight in at 100% of the efforts.
