User Generated Content and SEO (Part 5)

No good deed goes unpunished.

If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Okay, you get the idea.  

UGC is a great SEO device, but it does have a dark side.  That dark side is pretty scary, too.  It’s always scary when you relinquish some control, after all.  That’s what happens when you create space for user generated content.  You don’t own those visitors and you can’t control their behavior.  You can, and must, monitor them.  But if you get too draconian in your enforcement of “your way”, it’s going to choke off users from bothering to supply input.

What kind of risks are we talking about?  Spam is the obvious example.  You can expect to get loads and loads of spam dropped off on your doorstep every morning.  You’re going to need to find a way to keep it away (good filtering, etc.) or you’re going to need to be prepared to clean it up.

Don’t underestimate this problem, either.  It’s not just a matter of having some unattractive “free cialis” post in the middle of your great discussion about “how to retrofit the 2009 widget with a tumbler bar from the 2003 widget”.  Those spammy distractions discourage other users from participating.  They’re a huge turnoff.  They also put your whole site at risk.

We all know that Google is not a fan of sites that go around linking out to what it considers “bad neighborhoods”.  Well, that’s just what those spammers will do.  If you give them the chance, they’ll link out to every bad neighborhood you can imagine.  If you’re not on your toes and you get bowled over with spam, it could (quite literally) kill things off for you.  Welcome to the blacklist, lazy webmaster whose site features 1,000s of outbound links to malaware, porn and gambling sites!

That isn’t doomsday exaggeration, either.  It happens.

And that means that you’re going to need to make sure that you have the right security in place.  You’re going to want to validate accounts.  You’ll need to do some kind of spam catching ala Askimet.  You’ll need to actually moderate what’s going on in forums and discussion areas.  

On balance, UGC is a winner.  However, it must be handled effectively.  Failure to enact adequate safeguards can make the great idea of encouraging participation turn into a nightmare.

User Generated Content and SEO (Part 4)

Well, by now you should be convinced that UGC can be a huge gift in terms of SEO.  Now it’s time to ask yourself how to make use of it.

That really boils down to one thing:  attractive opportunities for interaction.  If you can create reasons and ways for your site’s visitors to lend their voice to the conversation, they’ll do just that.  You’ll walk away from it all with happier users an a healthy supply of SEO-friendly UGC.

Here are a few ways to start encouraging that interaction.

Good content.  Your own content needs to be good.  No one is going to be inspired to comment, argue, thank or expound upon something that’s dry, dull, boring or just plain lousy.  Think about what makes great link bait.  That’s what tends to create great UGC bait, too.

Comments.  Encourage comments.  That’s a little easier when you’re using a blog (if you’re not, you shoul probably add that component to your plans anyway), but it can be done with static pages, too.  You want to make it easy as possible for people to comment while still protecting yourself from spam.  Test your comment interface to make sure it’s friendly and do a little extra to nudge people toward leaving a comment.  Wordpress plug-ins that recognize the top commenters or that let people know what the commenter is doing on his or her own blog (i.e. CommentLuv) can help a lot.  It’s also a good idea to personally respond to comments in order to encourage dialog.  Oh, and when you respond, resist the occasional urge to be a jerk.  Maintain your best manners.

Contributors.  Actively solicit third-party contributions from readers.  Hey, the newspapers have managed to fill at least a page a day with “letters to the editor” for decades.  You can learn from their example.  People have an urge to be heard and to see their name next to a byline.  Make it easy to make a contribution and get material up and published ASAP.

Forums and Communities.  You can tack a forum onto your site, if you think you can get enough initial traffic and interest to support it.  You can also create smaller social communities using some great tools.  We’ll be honest, this can take some serious effort.  However, if it’s done the right way and really takes off, you can see amazing results.  Your site can become that “hangout” destination that people love.  And the fresh content supply will blow your mind.

Extras.  Take advantage of ways to “talk” to your visitors.  Pay attention to what they’re talking about and interact with them.  Ask them questions.  Offer prizes for great insights or answers.  You want your site to be more than a big stack of articles.  You want it to become a vibrant hub of activity.  That’s what brings the UGC.

User Generated Content and SEO (Part 3)

So, we can think of those users who would contribute content to your website as your free writing staff.  If you can effectively encourage them to supply the site with a lot of topic-related material, you’re going to see a few things happen.

First, you’ll start to notice more search traffic from keywords for which you didn’t intentionally optimize.  You never would’ve bothered isolating “repurposing widget cases” because it only gets a handful searches per day.  But, when you have commenters who happen to use the term a few times, you might find yourself atop Google for the term.  That one little instance alone might snag you an extra thousand visits per year.  And it won’t cost you a dime.

Second, you’ll probably see some improvement in your rankings for the big fish keywords, too.  If people are adding a great deal of thematically-related content to your site, they’re going to be using your chosen keywords in a relevant and natural fashion.  That’s what we call good content and, to beat the proverbial dead horse, content is king.

Third, you’ll see an uptick in backlinks, the co-king of SEO.  The increased traffic flow resulting from the long-tail keywords means more exposure to your site, which increases the chances of having people voluntarily link back to you.  Even more importantly, the fact that you’re supplying a quality user experience that includes the opportunity to engage in a discussion of your niche will lead people to link to you.  You’re giving them a good site an a fun place to be.  That’s the kind of thing that motivates voluntary linking.

It sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?  

A crew of unpaid writers who are helping you to dominate fistful after fistful of long-tail keywords while you see progress in terms of your main keywords and backlink totals…  Not a bad payoff for encouraging user participation!

User Generated Content and SEO (Part 2)

As we noted in the first part of this series, the old saying that “content is king” is still a cornerstone of effective SEO.  Search engines are designed to put users in touch with content that meets their needs.  If you don’t have the content it’s pretty darn hard for them to broker that little love connection.  In the end, it’s what the search engines really want.  They need happy users who appreciate being able to find the right content, so they are more than happy to deliver those visitors to you when you have the right content.

Now, what really constitutes the right content, anyway?  Most of us will immediately think of keywords when that question emerges.  We know that search engine users are looking for certain things based on their search queries.  If we can develop content that addresses these same issues and that uses the same language that searchers use, we can count on decent search traffic.

That’s why we spend a lot of time optimizing our pages for high-volume search terms.  We want to see those users on our sites.  Although user generated content is going to help in that regard–your commenters and contributors will undoubtedly use some of those great keyword phrases themselves–it’s real value lies off the beaten track of keyword research.

We’re talking about the so-called long-tail.  While there may be a million people per day looking for “widgets”, there may be only a handful looking for “how to subdivide a widget quickly”.  As traffic-hungry webmasters, we recognize that it would be really easy to pull down a number one spot in the SERPs for that uncommon phrase, but it doesn’t seem worth the time, money or effort necessary to go after it, right?

Right.  If you’re writing an article for all of those long-tail phrases that produce relatively few queries, you’re making a mistake.  It just isn’t efficient.

Now, on the other hand, if you could get other people to write content for you that contained gobs of those long-tails, you’d start seeing some nice traffic as the content mass built up.  

That would only make sense, though, if these people would do the work for you voluntarily.  Plus, you wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time monitoring their work.  You’d need an army of free writers with an interest in your topic in order to pull it off.

Doesn’t that sound a lot like user generated content?

User Generated Content and SEO (Part 1)

Whether you love or hate the phrase “Web 2.0″ you have to admit one thing…  The move toward more participatory websites has really changed the Internet’s landscape.  Interactivity was once a novelty.   The rise of comment opportunities, user pages and other opportunities has made it pretty commonplace.

And, on balance, that’s good news.  All of those tools and mechanisms designed to allow and encourage site visitors to add their two cents to the conversation has created an opening both for better user experiences and superior SEO.

Yes, SEO.  User generated content can be a real asset to the smart webmaster.  It can increase search traffic substantially and in ways that don’t contradict or overlap with your primary SEO objectives.  

The story starts with an old adage.  Content is king.  Admittedly, arguments still rate over whether content trumps linking and good on-page design, but the core of the position is sound.  If you want to experience the best possible SEO, you better have content.  And the more you have (assuming it’s the right stuff), the better off you are.

Historically, you built your content base by doing one of two things.  You either wrote a lot of material or you paid someone to write for you.  Both of those core techniques are still important and they still work very well.  But now there’s a third option–UGC.

While you build a site that provides value to users, your users can interact with the site in a way that builds value for you.  How’s that for a great symbiotic relationship?

Over the next few posts here at SEM Scoop, we’ll be examining UGC and how you can make it a functioning part of your search engine optimization.  We’re also going to take the time to discuss the risks (where there’s a reward, there’s a risk) associated with UGC.  Stay tuned!

The Great Backlink that Isn’t…

It sounds like a great offer. You can get a nice PR5 link for well under market value.

Remember that whole “if it sounds too good to be true” thing? That might be the case here.

No, we’re not talking about people faking page rank. That’s a different story. In this case, we’re talking about dropped or repurposed domains.

Here’s what happens. Someone has a blog. They maintain it. It gets a gob of great backlinks. It’s PR soars. And then something occurs. The webmaster abandons the project. Why? There are variety of possibilities. It might have been a blog about a specific time-bound event that’s now passed. It might be because he or she couldn’t resist reaching into the black hat cookie jar and the displayed PR hasn’t caught up to reality yet. There could be any number of reasons.

Now, either the original owner or someone who bought the blog from him or her (or who picked it up after domain expiration) is offering you a link. The blog may still be in its original form or, as is often the case, the old content may have been stripped out and replaced with something else.

Obviously, that PR5 link isn’t worth a hoot if the links pointing to the site are now dead-ending because of page changes. You don’t want to invest anything in a site that’s found its way onto Google’s blacklist, either.

So, how can you check? Do a little homework. Run a backlink checker on the site and find out if its inbound links are still hooked up with actual content. Head over to the Wayback Machine and check things out. See if the site has been shedding pages or if anything else fishy has been going on. Ask to see some traffic numbers and look for recent declines. And use a little sense. If the domain name and the content seem like a very poor match you might be barking up a useless tree.

Sometimes a great backlink isn’t so great.

Yes, Virginia, there Is a Sandbox!

Most have known it for some time. We’ve seen it in action. We’ve heard others gripe about it. Yet, for some reason, the debate lingered.

Did Google really have a “sandbox”?

Though evidence mounted, there was always a cadre of webmasters and SEO-interested parties who would claim that something other than the sandbox effect was responsible for newer and/or recently “renovated” sites that had previously enjoyed Google action suddenly experiencing massive drop-offs.

Now, however, we know that is was the sandbox.

Axandra reports:

“Google has recently filed a patent that details many points that Google uses to rank web pages. The title of the patent is “Information retrieval based on historical data” and it confirms the existence of the Google sandbox and that it can apply to all web pages.”

So, if you’ve been a sandbox denier it’s time to recalibrate your thinking. New sites might get the treatment, rendering them nearly invisible to Google users’ eyes for six to eight months. Older sites that are changed substantially might suffer a similar fate.

If your site does end up playing with the other kids in the sandbox, it’s not necessarily the end of the world. Sure, you’re going to have a rough go of things for awhile until you’re released. But there are a few things you can do while you wait out your time in the search engine equivalent of purgatory.

First, keep on building your site. Eventually, the sun will come up and it’ll be set free to roam the SERPs. It might as well be looking good and fully loaded when it emerges.

Second, there’s no rule against link building during sandbox days. Keep working to get attention and inbound links while it sits patiently.

Third, use the down time as an opportunity to find other non-search traffic streams. You could experiment with article or video marketing and other techniques, for instance. None of this stuff is going to hurt your site and you might just discover that you can develop a great additional source of traffic that won’t even be reliant upon Google.

You Don’t Search Like “They” Do…

If you’re reading this post, you undoubtedly have a little more experience behind the mouse than your average Internet user. You probably fall into the “expert user” category.

That’s a great thing and an absolute necessity for anyone who’s trying to make a living online. However, it means you’re using the Internet and search engines in a way that’s wholly different than the guy who gets home from work and decides to hop online to find a local Chinese joint that has sweet and sour pork on the menu and is willing to deliver to his neighborhood.

While you search with quotation marks and limit results to certain site types because of your understanding of the search engines, he might hunt and peck “http://www.google.com” into his browser and then go through the laborious process of slowly but surely tapping out “chinese restaurant with sweet and sour pork in Newbie Heights, NY”.

Why are we mentioning this? Well, it’s not to make fun of the poor guy who’s probably gonna wade through three pages of complete crappola before digging out his phone book and ordering a sausage pizza in a fit of frustration.

It’s because we need to think about the way people actually use search as we optimize our pages and test for competition. When we wrongly fall into a pattern of believing that our search experience is anything like “their” search experience, we accidentally distance ourselves from the reality of the standard user experience.

The next time you need to find something, try to do it intuitively and simply. Act like the average user on your first go-through. You’ll be surprised at how lousy the results probably are. And that might just give you a few ideas of how you can structure your projects, what kind of keywords you should be going after, and how you should structure content for those keywords.

Keywords That Produce Results

Not all keywords are created equal. Even those that do appear to be remarkably similar can be wildly different in terms of their real value. Take these two hypothetical examples, for instance.

“Where to buy blue widgets now”

“Where to blue widgets come from’

Clearly, they’re in the same ballpark, thematically speaking. They’re both about blue widgets. Let’s say that both of them get an equal number of searches every month, too. As it turns out, they both have the same number of competing pages, too. Thus, they both have the exact same KEI.

Which one is worth more to you? If you’re selling blue widgets, the first one is the clear winner. If you’re selling a book about the history of blue widgets, however, the secon option might do more for you.

This is a pretty obvious example and it certainly isn’t hard to see why you might love one keyword more than the other. In practice, it’s not always quite this clear. However, the core principle remains in place. It’s not just the words. It’s not just the numbers. In terms of producing real results, it’s important to think about what the words mean, too.

That’s not always our strength, especially when we’re dealing with big projects. In those cases, it’s a lot easier to deal with the numbers than it is to apply our noodles to the actual meaning of the search terms. However, it’s likely that the seemingly inefficient use of human intervention in keyword quality assessment could produce better outcomes.

Are you really looking at your keywords in terms of their meaning and probable repercussions or are you running the numbers and divvying up the workload?

Assessing the meaning and the “stories” behind keywords is a subjective process and we don’t have tools that will handle it for us–yet. But it can still pay off in a big way.

SEO and CSS (Part 2)

In our first post of this 2-post exercise, we briefly discussed CSS and its application in terms of site design. We also noted that the efficiency and ease of use it encourages can free up valuable time to tend to other SEO activity.

Today, let’s focus on the actual on-page search engine optimization value that Cascading Style Sheets possess.

When search engines visit a page, they don’t look at the whole and then start analyzing individual sections. They don’t have that ability. Instead, they start reading at the top and work their way down through the code and content. Because those bots aren’t all that bright, they can struggle a little bit when it comes to differentiating the really important stuff from the stuff that just happens to be there (or that just has to be there to make it all look pretty).

So they’re programmed to work on a few assumptions. One of those assumptions is that the important part of any page is likely to be at the beginning of the page. That’s fairly reasonable. Most pages don’t hide their purpose in the last paragraph of a long missive.

However, many pages don’t actually feature the most important things on the top. That’s because other code necessary for design and presentation end up sneaking up toward the top–and remember, those bots are reading the code, too.

CSS tends to fix that.

Search Engine Journal states it pretty succinctly:

“Using CSS, you can organize your code so the search engines see your real content first regardless of where it appears on the page.”

And that, in a nutshell, is why using CSS can help you out in the SERPs. It’s going to make sure the bots see the right things in the right places and it’s going to make working with the site efficient, allowing you to add more content or to pursue other SEO objectives.

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