By now you’ve probably learned that everything has it’s own SEO, or it’s own way of optimizing for the best results. Your website, social networks, and third-party websites should all be optimized so you get the most exposure for your brand, and SlideShare presentations are no different. According to the SlideShare about page, it has 18 million uploads and is among one of the top 100 most visited websites, so it’s a must-have platform for small businesses looking to educate and gain more brand exposure.
If you want to get a piece of the pie it’s important you not only get involved with SlideShare, but create presentations with great SEO for the SlideShare algorithm as well as getting your presentation ranked on Google. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy if you know what’s unique about the platform and have a few standard SEO tactics under your belt.
Top 7 SEO Techniques to Use on Your SlideShare Presentation
If you’ve never created a SlideShare presentation before, it’s incredibly easy to do. Simply visit the website, sign-up, upload a presentation and you’re done. It’s completely free, and most of the presentations you see on the website have already been given at conferences or during meetings. In other words, you don’t have to create new content if you don’t want to, which makes it one of the quickest ways to gain visibility with a targeted audience.
Once you have a solid portfolio of presentations on your SlideShare dashboard, consider some of the tips below to optimizing your page as well as each presentation:
Focus on Target Keywords
This includes using keywords in your title, your description, and your PDF file name (which will also be your URL) just as you would any piece of content or any webpage. SlideShare also reports that tags increase searchability by 30%, so this is another important place for keywords. The platform will also transcribe your presentation, so using keywords within your presentation can help you rank for relevant terms both with Google and within SlideShare. You can still conduct keyword research using the Keyword Planner tool from Google AdWords, which is what I recommend to get started.
Also remember that just as with blog posts, it helps to center your presentations around keyword phrases that are important to your audience. This will help make it easier to rank for those terms.
Keep It Clear and Concise
Long form content is great for several reasons when it comes to a blog post or a guest post, but that’s not the case with SlideShare. If you look around SlideShare, you’ll see that the readers are looking for quick and creative slides that get the point across. This means you should avoid a lengthy amount of text and focus on pictures and bullet points. If one slide is getting too long, break it up into two different slides. So what does this have to do with SEO? In theory, this should help your presentation become more shareable, which means more natural links, which means a higher ranking.
Have a Length of 8-15 Slides
In addition to making sure your presentation isn’t too wordy, you also don’t want it to be too long. There are a lot of theories with different conclusions about how long is optimal, but we agree with Convince and Convert that 8-15 slides is optimal.
Integrate with LinkedIn and Share Presentations
LinkedIn acquired SlideShare back in 2012, so you can actually integrate your LinkedIn account with your SlideShare account. In fact, this is now the default, so you shouldn’t have to do anything to get started. This means that your presentations will also show up on your LinkedIn profile automatically. This, in addition to sharing your presentations and embedding them on your blog, will help you earn more visibility. Again, there is nothing new here in terms of SEO best practices.
Remember to Revise Your Older Presentation
This is something that so many companies forget. If you just gave a presentation or held a meeting and plan to upload it to SlideShare that’s great, but you may need to make a few slight revisions. Remember that your audience is no longer in a room with you and all they have is your presentation. If you have a slide with just one word on it and then explained it when you gave the presentation, that one-word isn’t going to make sense to the new SlideShare readers. This means you need to add a little bit more context. Just like the point above it will make your presentation more shareable, which should help you rank.
Use SlideShare Analytics
On your dashboard, there is a tab for Analytics. Use this data to see which content is getting the most attention in terms of traffic and views and engagement (comments, favorites, downloads, etc.). Just as with Google Analytics, this can help you find trends with your SlideShare audience so that you can make sure to write about similar subjects in the future and/or mimic your successful posts’ SEO for future presentations.
Extra: Add Your Contact Information to the End and Don’t Forget to Link
So this is nothing revolutionary, but it can help jog the memory of readers and help you build up followers and increase traffic to your site. Be sure to link to your website and tell who you are and you’ll get more than just SEO benefits.
Once again as we mentioned above, when optimizing your SlideShare presentations you’re doing this to both rank on the actual SlideShare platform for those searches, but you’re also helping your presentation to rank well on Google because Google indexes SlideShare content. In other words, it’s a win-win.
For a list of example SlideShare presentations about SEO, visit this article we wrote earlier in the year. Then let us know what you do to improve your presentations or what you like to see from company SlideShare pages in the comment section below.