The only thing more important than designing an effective presentation is getting it out there. This recipe looks into the best practices for search engine optimization and presentation information.
The Brainshark search page
This section will look into how to fill out your presentation information to optimize search rankings:
First and foremost, aim to include a title that matches what your audience would use on a search engine. For instance, if you were selling Internet marketing software for small businesses, you could include
Top 10 Ways to Promote Your Productas the title, as it would be a reasonable search query on search engines such as Google, Yahoo! Search, or Bing. Most importantly, keep this short (at 50 characters or ) as Brainshark uses the title in various places for search rank (the rankwhich your page shows up on a search engine results page) purposes.
Include a brief description (keep this at 100 characters or ) of the slideshow. This will show up in search results when keywords that are bound to the slideshow link to the webpage. Try to keep this at a maximum of two sentences.
Select up to 3 categories that will help represent your presentation. Make sure that they accurately portray your presentation type as incorrect categories can hurt your search ranking if your page is backlinked (when your page is linked from an external source like a blog or magazine website) from a website under different categories.
Select tags for your presentation. Note that these will have a negligible effect on search engine results. Tags are primarily for Brainshark's internal search and will help people search for your presentation from within the website. Thus, there are few restrictions around how these should be designed.
Search engines such as Google, Yahoo! Search, and Bing deploy spiders, computer programs designed to visit web pages (also known as crawling), and retrieve relevant information for searchers. For instance, a spider may go onto a ski resort website in order to retrieve specific keywords such as the location of the resort, the category of the website (recreation, in this case), and its name. All of this information gets indexed and used to decide the ranking of a search result when a user searches something on the web. This ranking can be positively affected by relevance between the search terms and the indexed keywords or even negatively affected by irrelevance instead. Thus, it is important to ensure that all tags or categories selected previously relate to the presentation at hand. In addition, long descriptions and titles can lead to more specific search keywords, leading to a lesser search ranking.
There's no doubt that alongside search rankings, a little bit of marketing can go a long way. By adding compelling presentation titles, one is able to improve clickthrough rates and sell the product at a much faster pace. This section will delve into this concept briefly.
Titles of Brainshark presentations have the strongest effect on search engines and Brainshark's internal search capability. Thus, it is important to master the art of presentation title design in order to increase clickthroughs and sales conversions. To do this, you'll need to find out what keeps your audience awake at night. What are their pain points and what are they most likely to search up on the Internet to solve them?
Survey your existing customers to find out what pain points you help to solve the most with your product.
In "Pain Killer Marketing", the authors Henry DeVries and Chris Stielhl found that 12 to 15 personal interviews lead to approximately 80 percent of the available pain points for their respective market. More importantly, you should aim to:
Meet their expectations by ensuring that the presentation title matches the content presented. Otherwise, you may find people leaving your presentation a lot sooner than expected.
In addition to meeting expectations, ensure that they can get the information they need as succinctly as possible. If your title is "Top 10 Ways To Get More Customers", your audience should be able to immediately jump to the 10 points and begin reading.
Don't forget to include your product and link it to the presentation description. For instance, assuming we used the previous title and your product was able to get more customers, feel free to include a call-to-action for your product.