Unless a website is frequently updating its pages with new product information or service offerings, it will see its influence, with both readers and search engines, decline over time. I’d like to share ways to generate content that not only will help you maximize your website’s visibility, but also improve its usefulness to your visitors.
There are portions of your site that are easy to forget: Application Notes in a PDF, photos of an industry event, a how-to video or product demo. These are your digital assets and anything that’s digital can be optimized for search.
By optimizing your copyrighted images for search engines, you can add even more keyword focus to a Web page. Allow the search engines to reach the directory they live in, and offer a plain image behind any that are displayed in Flash enhancers, so that they can be indexed.
Even if you don’t own the rights to images you use on your blog, for example, when you insert the image, you can write a unique title and alternative text. Always be thinking of how that image illustrates the content on the page, and fill in those fields with keywords that count.
Ideally, you want to include alt tags, a link title tag, a proper title to the actual image file (Please, please, please don’t name your photos 075413ssl.jpg!) and metadata inside the images to better associate them with branded and non-brand keywords.
Expanding the Shelf Life of PDFs & PowerPoints
Besides being a great B2B lead generation tool, white papers can enjoy a shelf-life beyond their initial posting to your website. Search engines will crawl and index this content if you provide a pathway to it.
When you post your PDFs, or similar documents, to your site, make sure they contain at least one link inside the document back to your site, preferably with anchor text pointed to a specific and relevant page. When you offer a free e-book or case study for someone to publish on their own website, you’ve now created an incoming link from Web properties that have downloaded and shared your content.
Incoming links from a variety of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) help lift your pages in search engine results. This is a great way to leverage “free” downloads plus you can ask for an email address as fair exchange and begin a conversation.
Share the Search Love
Most companies spend days and weeks developing sales materials, press releases and collateral material. Social sites, such as SlideShare, have made it simple and convenient to push your PowerPoint presentations to a broader audience and amplify your message to your target market.
Your visitors and potential customers perceive this as valuable content; search engines do too!
Photo credit: Master Isolated Images
