User Generated Content and SEO (Part 6)

So, let’s wrap this discussion up.

The bottom line is that UGC can be your best friend if you really make a point of encouraging and managing it.  Its value will be minimal if you don’t get the snowball rolling and its negative repercussions can be severe if you’re not willing to tend to it correctly.

Think about it, though.  You can have countless people develop a personal stake in returning to your site.  You can create vital hubs of activity within a niche.  You can have a massive crew of niche-educated writers supplying your site with new, fresh, original content.  You can start getting more long-tail traffic from the search engines and you can even boost your performance with respect to your bigger, more competitive keywords.  

That’s a hefty list of advantages.  If you’re site is in a space that will lend itself to UGC and you’re willing to take on the responsibilitiy for managing the content as it pours in, it can be a spectacular strategy.

I thought we’d close this series of posts on UGC and SEO by providing you with some additional resources on the subject.  If you’re going to make a play for more UGC at your site, these will make some excellent foundational reading.

Lee Odden, TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog, User Generated Content for SEO.

Industrial Search Engine Marketing, Take Advantage of User Generated Content.

SearchWritten, Checklist User Generated Content and SEO.

Search Engine Roundtable, SEO and User Generated Content

Search Engine Roundtable, Maximizing SEO Returns with User Generated Content

Search Engine Land, The Search Engine Friendly Appeal of User Generated Content 

SEOptimize, User Generated Content Can Ruin Your SEO

Wet Paint Injected Blog, User Generated Content Requires a New Kind of SEO

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!