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?

Is Google Taking Another Look at Directory Links? Change is a Constant.

If there’s one thing you can count on in the world of search engine optimization, it’s change.  What works this year might be useless next year.  Sure, there are a few things you can do that should always work (great content, frequent updating, etc.), but everything else is subject to change.

Take linking, for example.  Links have long been the lifeblood of good off-site SEO and that’s unlikely to change any time soon.  The way search engines evaluate inbound links to your site, however, is subject to change.  The engines have long been trying to perfect the way they evaluate links to insure that they’re legitimate “votes of confidence” for your site and that has made several old-school strategies just as useless as excessive keyword stuffing.  Thing “FFA link pages” and you’ll understand just how different things are today from where they were a few years ago.

We might be witnessing another change right now.

If you looked at the Google webmaster guidelines a few months ago, you’d see that Google recommended submitting your site to pertinent directories.  Google has long relied on DMOZ (the Open Directory Project) and other directory links to help determine the way it ranks sites.

That’s led many webmasters to submit their sites to a wide variety of directories in pursuit of inbound links.  It’s a popular strategy and there are literally thousands of directories out there who are willing to offer a link to almost any submitted site.  

Google, however, has made a change.  That line about submitting your site to directories?  It’s gone.  They removed it from their webmaster guidelines.  As a result, many in the SEO biz are arguing that Google may be devaluing all of those directory links floating around out there.  Paid directories themselves are falling off in rank.  

Although those who claim Google has never valued many of the “lower quality” directories in the first place, it is possible that we’re witnessing another change in how the search engines will be treating the currency of SEO, inbound links.

Using H1 Tags for Effective SEO

While a great deal of SEO focus is applied to off-page efforts (getting those ever-important backlinks), it’s important to remember the “roots” of SEO–on-page optimization.  In that spirit, let’s look at H1 tags and how you can use them to make your pages more attractive to Google and the other search engines.

Tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) are part of HTML coding and they alert the search engine bots that what they’re reading is considered more important than the other content on the page.  The H1 tag sits atop of the tagging hierarchy and judicious use of the element can be an effective SEO tool.  Search engines tend to take notice of the words surrounding by the H1 tag.

SEOManagement provides some insight regarding H1s and search engines:

Search engines interpret header tags as indicators of relevancy. They perceive H1 and H2 tagged text as the most important part of the. That’s why header tags should be used wisely in order to reinforce the overall effectiveness of the content and contribute to higher search engine rankings. Too many H1 tags throughout the regular text body may have a negative impact on search engine rankings. H1 tag should contain the central keyword of the web page. If there are secondary keywords they can be given more weight with the help of a H2 tag.

The H1 tag should only be used once per page.  You’re not going to fool the search engines by wrapping every keyword on a page in the H1 wrapper–that will just dilute its effectiveness.  

Since you’re only using the H1 one time, it’s important to make a smart decision.   You don’t want to waste the H1 tag on something trivial like a date.  Ideally, you’re going to choose to use it for the page’s title text–and that text is going to accurately depict the rest of the page’s content while simultaneously using the keyword for which you’re trying to rank. 

Evaluate your pages in terms of tag use.  If you’re not making the most of your H tags, it might be time to crank up your HTML editor and to get to work!