Tag: QR codes. mobile web

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Using QR Codes For Your Business

Now that you has seen QR Codes or Quick Response Codes on other sites how can you use them too? Here are a few of my suggestions.

Add a QR Code to Your Print Brochures
Add a QR Code to your print brochure, you can send your user to your home page or better yet send them to a custom created landing page that has a special offer to allow you to actually measure the results of your exposure from a trade show, speaking engagement, direct mailing.

Offer Special Coupon Codes and Promotions
Want to track mobile Web users? As most desktop users are not using QR Code scanners, you can encode special offers as a text snippet and even embed a special coupon code in a QR Code that can then be used immediately by smartphone users.

Encourage Google HotPot, FourSquare, and Google Places Reviews
By embedding your QR Code on your menu or guest check, restaurants can encourage visitors to interact immediately with location specific places to share their favorite spots with others and encourage visitors to even leave service reviews.

Print a QR Code on the back of your business card
With the ability to embed a vCard in your QR Code, you can make it easy for smartphone users to add your contact information to their phone and if they are syncing to Outlook will appear there too.

How do you think you will use a QR Code? Just click comments and let me know your suggestion too.

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QR Codes and SEO

QR codes are a great way to interact with users of the mobile web guiding them from print resources to your web links, but can you use QR codes for SEO purposes? At this time my feeling is maybe but most likely not in the way you thought.

Add me to your smartphone address book by scanning.
Add me to your smartphone address book by scanning.

If you generate your QR code and then save the image to your own server you are most likely defeating any SEO benefits. If you are using a generator that saves your image on their server and you just point to the image there, there may be some small benefit of link juice you may capture or search engine discovery, but not enough in my mind, to warrant linking to the image location off site. If you are shrinking your link and the link shrinking service is saving the link URL and history you may get a small benefit.

QR codes are images and are read with an optical device, so this means that Google cannot spider nor read the images and so putting QR codes on your website will do nothing for SEO purposes. Although Google is not indexing QR codes, it is embracing them. Here’s how. Visit Google’s link shrinker at http://goo.gl/. Shrink your link, then paste your link in your browser address bar and add .qr at the end. Go to the link and you will see that Google has automatically made a scannable QR code for your link. Additionally if you are logged into your Google account when you shrink your link, Google will keep a history of your links as well as the number of clicks recorded visiting the link.

Although search engines can’t read QR codes, if you make your codes with the URL shrinker at Google, Google will keep a history of the links and may discover your pages on its own, but will QR codes improve your organic placement like blogging content will, no, but they are cool to use for connecting with mobile web users and definitely a technology to use and keep a careful eye on.