User Generated Content in SEO

By Paul Spreadbury, September 26, 2007 | Comments (1)

As mentioned countless other times in previous Blogs adding content to your site is crucial in your quest for rankings. This content needs to be optimised whilst simultaneously providing useful information to your users. Writing content for your site however can be the most troublesome and time consuming aspect of the internet marketing process.

There is however a possible solution – user-generated content.

User generated content is the process of users adding content to your site, this extra content, you as the site owner will not have to create. Not only does this process save you tons of time it will help your listings, as Google likes to see fresh new content updated regularly.

In addition, if you can get users to regularly return and interact with your site, chances are you might obtain a back link to your site. This would be a natural back link from a related site, which again helps your rankings.

You can’t however just rely on user generated content, much of the content you will still have to write yourself. Remember that typically user generated content will not be fully optimized to your required search terms.

There are many different ways to encourage user generated content, I have listed a few of these options below:

  • Encourage users to post articles to the site
  • Offer a poll to users on a topic related to your site
  • Ask your visitors a question related to your industry. Make the question controversial so to attract the most interest possible, a Blogging system could be used for users to discuss possible answers to the question
  • Give users a reason to get involved with the site – This could include offering discounts on some of your products or services for the winner of a quiz etc
  • Offer the ability to post reviews on your products or services, this not only provides extra content it enforces the quality of your products to potential buyers.

Remember that user generated content will normally need to be moderated before allowing it to appear on your site, always check for spam and quality of the content. Always focus content on your particular niche and meet the needs of your particular users.

Paul
SEO Programmer

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One Response to “User Generated Content in SEO”

  1. You left out community content. If you can create a community site you can allow the content to be self moderated, then the website will never need to be edited (or in some cases, even looked at) by the site owner again.

    I personally have numerous websites that I never even look at as they’re all ticking over nicely by themselves, being used and moderated by the communities that use them.

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