Perhaps you have noticed that while searching for certain terms in Google or some other search engine, documents published on YUDU rank high in relevance – often on the first page. As we mentioned back in January, YUDU is a powerful tool for giving you a boost in search engine placement, something many companies pay thousands of dollars a month to SEO firms to accomplish for them. There are several reasons why, so in an effort to give you more detail about how you can use YUDU for your search engine marketing, we have identified 5 steps that will increase your “findability” online and boost traffic to your website. Obviously, results will vary based on popularity of search term and the amount of relevant content, however, here are YUDU’s 5 Steps to Higher Search Engine Ranking:

Step 1 – Publish on YUDU

YUDU is a simple and powerful publishing engine. You can convert most popular document formats into stunning, flip-style digital publications. In addition, all documents are text searchable and optimized for search engines. Not only is the entire publication indexed, but individual pages as well. Google even re-indexes YUDU.com every 2 hours, so new content shows up quickly. Also, because YUDU.com is ranked in the top 20,000 websites worldwide according to traffic and it adds thousands of pages of fresh content every day, search engines place high value on items hosted on the YUDU.com domain.

The first step is to publish your brochures, presentations, white papers, catalogues, eNewsletters and more using the YUDU conversion tool. When converting your documents, be sure to give them a search friendly names as this title will show up in the URL. Also, make sure that the text is embedded in your PDF before you upload it to YUDU.

Step 2 – Make Your Creation Public and Add Tags, Description, and Categories

YUDU.com offers multiple ways to categorize your publication so that it is easy to find in the YUDU library. Each publication has an “Item Details” page that acts as a sort of landing page for the document. On the Item Details page, there is a spot to add a description, tags, and to categorize your document according to YUDU’s list of categories. Once you have determined your keyword strategy, optimize your tags, descriptions, and categories accordingly. Don’t forget to make your edition public so the search engines can see it as well. A simple search for “sainsbury’s recipes” on Google UK can show you how effective a YUDU Item Details page can be.

Step 3 – Enhance With Hyperlinks

Once your publication has been tagged and categorized appropriately, the next step is to hyperlink specific content in the publication back to your website. If you have full URLs within your document, in most cases YUDU will “sniff” these out and automatically hyperlink them to the appropriate site. However, with the YUDU Plus upgrade, you can create a hyperlink out of any area on any page within your publication. Since YUDU.com has such a high influence factor based on its traffic and dynamic content, Google and other search engines will place a higher value on a link from YUDU.com than most other websites. This means that a link from YUDU.com to content on your own website can help drive your relevance up according to the search engines.

Step 4 – Create a Personalized YUDU Library

YUDU gives you the capability to collect all the documents you publish, other content that you find on the YUDU website, as well as audio content, video content, and bookmarks to websites all together in your own personalized library. The primary use for this library is to aggregate your content for easy access. However, you can personalize you library with a custom name, full bio, and link to your website. These features drive not only traffic back to your website, but are a great spot for keywords to drive search engine placement. To see an example of how this works, here is a search on Google UK for “Brian Critchfield Navel Marketing“.

Step 5 – Create an Interest Group

The last step is to utilize a powerful feature within YUDU to build an interest group around a particular topic realted to your key words. With interest groups, you not only invite people to join and participate, but the group has its own library, description, title, and tags. These are all opportunities to use your keywords in meaningful ways to drive placement on search engines. Google indexes these description pages so utilize them to optimize your search engine marketing. For an example of how this can work, look at the placement for my own Social Media 201 group on Google UK when you search for the term “social media 201″.

As you can see there are multiple ways that YUDU can help you boost your presence online. With billions of websites indexed by the major Internet search engines, it is crtical to stand out from the crowd. Using the 5 tips above, you should be able to increase your findability online and improve traffic to your website and your business.

But don’t just take our word for it. If you don’t already have an account, go to http://www.yudu.com, sign up, and try these steps for yourself. You’ll be glad you did.