I’ve been using document shares on and off for quite a while now but have recently decided to make them a more regular part of my internet marketing.

Several reasons:

• They’re easy to do
• They show up in the search results
• The sites have their own internal search which also sends more traffic
• You can include links in the documents you upload – some sites don’t make the links clickable in the first few slides to discourage spammers and I’m not sure if search engines index the links but real users can click them
• People can optionally download or share parts of the documents
• Sites like SlideShare typically have more authority than your own website (much the same as YouTube does)

The site I use most is SlideShare – it’s owned by LinkedIn so is likely to be here for the foreseeable future.

The range of documents you can upload is wide:

• PDFs
• PowerPoint presentations and their Open Office equivalents
• Word processor documents – Microsoft and Open Office formats
• Text files

I’ve not done it yet but you can also embed videos inside your presentations.

All in all, there’s a lot of upside for the time spent.

People look at things on the internet differently and find things in different ways. Searches are done in a variety of ways, from different locations and on different devices.

The more ways you have for people to find you, the better.

Some people worry about duplicate content if they’re uploading essentially the same document to a document sharing site as well as their own website.

In practice, that doesn’t matter (otherwise Google would only display one result if you searched for a song lyric) – duplicate content only applies on a per-website basis. So if you had lots of identical or near-identical pages on a single website, that’s when duplicate content penalties come into play.

SlideShare and similar sites have lots of tips and tricks to get the most from your uploads.

It’s worth reading through those tips and tricks before you do your first upload or soon after but don’t get hung up on the process too much. You’ll learn lots just by uploading a presentation yourself and seeing just how easy the process is.

It’s a lot easier than uploading a YouTube video – there are a lot less boxes to complete.

I usually amend the title of the presentation – it gets picked up from the file name but seems to change it to sentence case rather than Title Case.

I’ll then select the main topic – much like YouTube, I suspect that this is just a hangover from the early days of the site but it’s easy enough to select something reasonably appropriate.

Then add in some keywords – you’ll get suggestions as you type and they’ll get stored in the system and they seem to be used to come up with the suggestions for other recommended presentations.

Finally, add in a brief description. The first part of this will usually get used by Google as the description they show in the search results. Much like YouTube, most of it doesn’t get shown on the SlideShare site unless people click the “more” option so you don’t have to create much content for the description.

Apart from clicking the publish button, that’s it.

It’s simple and quick.

If you want more info about this and other ways to make your content work harder, take a look here.