SEO tips
Site owners have been given some SEO best practice guidelines on how to maximise the impact of user-generated content.
Tom_C, an SEOmoz associate, said that the best websites incorporate interactive features such as blogs, comments, reviews, thumbs up and polls. But he also noted that many website owners were failing to extract the maximum SEO benefit from all this additional content. Consequently, he argued that companies need to optimise all content regardless of whether it has been written in-house or by visitors.
5 ways to improve SEO
According to Tom_C, there are five simple ways to improve the SEO value of user-generated content:
- Nudge users into doing SEO for you - It is important to encourage visitors to follow SEO best practice guidelines when submitting user-generated content. For instance, site owners may want to enforce a minimum and maximum title length, description, tags and links to related content.
- Mash up your own content for agile rankings - Site owners may find it advantageous to aggregate user-generated content to attract the attention of search engines. This might take the form of building fixed content pages around long-term keyword goals such as "poker videos" or short-term wins such as "draft picks 2010".
- Link building is hard – get someone else to do it - It's worthwhile adding widgets and embeddable code to user-generated content, so that visitors can easily share their work on blogs and social media portals.
- Use your community to do research - A useful tip is to encourage users to fill in feedback forms and surveys, which in turn will make sites more user-friendly and perhaps throw up new SEO keywords.
- Educate your users on SEO - Finally, it is a good idea to give users a basic understanding of SEO in the hope that it will inspire them to supply content with search engine rankings in mind.
