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?