The saying is that an image is worth a thousand words. I guess in the Internet age that should be "a keyword is worth a thousand words".

Last week I did some SEO (Search Engine Optimization) research on PowerTOC. The reason is that I have been surprised of the few people reaching our site from search sites. When you have the only PowerPoint add-in that creates table of contents of presentations, and your ranking on search engines for "powerpoint table of contents" is high, you are bound to receive a big proportion of people looking for these keywords, aren’t you?

It seems that I made a mistake when I did my initial research for PowerTOC. I have always used the term "Table of Contents" but it seems that most users of PowrePoint use either Summary or Agenda. Therefore potential users of PowerTOC are making searches for "powerpoint summary slide" or "powerpoint agenda slide", and the many variations like "how to create a summary slide in powerpoint".

Of course the search engines won’t treat "table of contents" as a synonym for either "agenda" or "summary" and therefore no pages for PowerTOC won’t be returned in these searches. All these potential customers of PowerTOC are lost.

On my following post "How to create a summary slide on PowerPoint", I will show you how can you generate a summary slide using the built in "Summary slide" button on PowerPoint versions 97 to 2003. I will also explain why PowerTOC is a better solution.