SEO Diva

A new site I discovered, Scribd, is a “document sharing community” where you can:

• Upload and share your documents.
• Find interesting documents by category, by topic group, by searching, or by just browsing our library.

The interface is nice, and it’s easy to upload a document and add a description and tags. Most document file formats are accepted, including images and video, as well as the following:

• Adobe PDF (.pdf)
• Adobe PostScript (.ps)
• Microsoft Word (.doc)
• Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt, .pps)
• Microsoft Excel (.xls)
• OpenOffice Text Document (.odt, .sxw)
• OpenOffice Presentation Document (.odp, .sxi)
• OpenOffice Spreadsheet (.ods, .sxc)
• All OpenDocument formats
• StarOffice Documents
• Plain text (.txt)
• Rich text format (.rtf)

You can then email, embed, share, Stumble, fav it, and add your document to one of the Scribd groups. The viewable documents are iPhone compatible. You can enable or disable downloads.

The site keeps track of how many people view your documents. There are groups, discussions, and comments on documents stored on Scribd. You can join relevant groups and add your document to them. Make sure it contains a link to your site.

On the downside, although the site says it is looking for for new, unpublished content, there were members with obviously copied items like pages from legal tomes, restaurant menus, and 25,000 Project Gutenberg documents. It’s a handy place to read the Gutenberg items, but the site needs to decide what they’re about and then enforce their guidelines.

I uploaded a presentation I recently made at Desert Code Camp, held at the University of Advanced Technology, SEO Essentials for Web Sites, aka Mostly White Hat SEO, and then embedded the link in an Active Rain post. I think it’s pretty cool how you can scroll through the entire PowerPoint document within the post via the iPaper platform (based on Adobe Flash) used by Scribd.

It will be interesting to watch this site and see how it progresses.

Popularity: 27% [?]