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!