With all of the great places to publish content online today, it very likely that you can secure multiple spots in the search engine rankings with your content. One place I’ve found that seems to be beneficial in terms of ranking in search engines is Slideshare.net.

Slideshare is a social media content site that allows you to upload, favorite, bookmark, tag, and comment on slide shows. Additionally, you can join groups, download slideshows, and are provided with code to embed or link to slideshows on your blog or website. Like any social media site, being an active networker on Slideshare by commenting, favoriting, joining groups, and linking to slideshows can boost your slideshow’s visibility and backlinks.

I stumbled upon the SEO benefits of Slideshare by accident after publishing a slideshow not for rankings, but for purely utilitarian purposes. Soon, I realized that the slideshow was ranking on page 1 of Google for a term with 1.5 million results. And that was without being active at all in the Slideshare community.

Tips for Optimizing With Slideshare

• Use your keyword in the title: The title of your slideshow will become the title tag of the page. Since there is not much room for text on the page, optimizing the title is of critical importance.
• Use keywords in the summary: You are allotted small amount of room to write a summary – write a pithy, informative summary that is optimized for visitors and search engines.
• Use tags: I’m not sure how much of a role tags play in SEO, but they will certainly help other Slideshare users find your content when searching for slideshows on various topics.
• Use large text in your slide show: Though your text may seem very readable when viewing your slideshow on your computer screen, keep in mind that the slideshow will be much smaller once published on Slideshare. Though users can download the slideshow, they should be able to read it easily in the smaller format.

Ways to Use Slideshare

Once you begin brainstorming, you'll probably begin thinking of all kinds of reasons to use Slideshows to deliver content. Here are a few ideas:

• 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

The nice thing about Slideshare is that once the content is published, it seems to be indexed by the search engines very quickly. Another slide show I published was ranking on page 3 within just a few days of being published after linking to it once from my blog.

Your Thoughts

Have you tried Slideshare? What are some other creative ways to use slideshows in your marketing campaigns?