User Generated Content pretty much rules the web these days. If a website isn't including comments, blogs, reviews, thumbs up or polls then frankly it might as well be a book instead of a website. Lame. So this post is all about how to squeeze the most SEO benefit out of your user generated content.
Remember folks that even if you don't have "classical" user generated content these tips are applicable if you put out a large amount of content, regardless of whether it's UGC or in-house. If you have a team of writers you can pretty much think of them like a small bunch of users creating UGC for your site so these tips apply for many different types of sites. If these tips don't apply then you're probably running a boring website anyway. :-P
1) Nudge Users Into Doing SEO For You
This is one of the most powerful tools in your UGC armory and applies equally well to UGC uploads and also in-house content generation (how many in-house SEOs have come up against CMS limitations in teh past!). The idea is simple - firstly you need to figure out what a perfectly optimised UGC upload looks like. For example, say I was doing SEO for youtube (I'm not btw) I might consider a video like this pretty much spot on:
This video has all of the key elements
- A descriptive title with the relevant keyphrases in there ("omg cat" and "dramatic chipmunk")
- Submitted to the correct category ("comedy")
- Lots of good relevant tags added (like "slack" and "jawed")
- A good (though not actually perfect) description with the main keywords repeated on the page.
Compare that to a video like this which has virtually zero SEO value:
The video title is "640x360.mp4", there's no description and no tags.
So when you're building your UGC upload process (or internal CMS for uploading content) you need to build in as many nudges as possible to turn videos like the second into videos like the first. What these nudges might be will vary wildly and depends on your definition of a perfectly optimised page and what sort of content users are uploading. That said, here's a few nudges that you might want to consider:
- Enforce a minimum and maximum title length. This will force people to put at least a few relevant phrases in there but also avoid spamming the title with too many phrases.
- Enforce a description.
- Let users choose their own related content on the site and embed links to those pieces of content automatically. This can be a good way of increasing internal linking to strong content.
- Provide users with some popular tags they might want to use instead of letting them think for themselves.
It's important to note here that some of these changes might seem to be a trade off between usability and SEO, enforcing a description for example might lose you a few video uploads. You should carefully watch this to ensure that you don't kill conversion rates in the process and you should strongly emphasise WHY a description is important to ensure users are motivated to add one. Be sure to put the WHY in their own terms (i.e. "your video will get more views and comments if you include a description"). Linkedin does this very well with their "your profile is only 60% complete" calls to action.
2) Mash Up Your Own Content for Agile Rankings
Sometimes we get quite hung up in SEO as to what exactly we mean by "unique content". We might check for example, that an article written for a website is unique. But once we determine that the content is unique how many times can we put that article on our site? Can we re-use the headline on multiple pages? Full answers to these questions is beyond the scope of this post, suffice to say that you can often get away with re-using sections of unique content on more than one page on your site. And unique content is an asset. So consider these two situations:
Ranking For Head Terms - If your site is full of user generated content then you will naturally have plenty of long-tail phrases nailed. But what about the big terms? These terms are harder to nail down. Instead of relying on your community to optmise for this phrase, instead you can aggregate content from your community and sit it on a page that otherwise is perfectly optimised by hand. For example, let's continue looking at youtube and consider the keyphrase "poker videos". Now in the UK there are no youtube results for this on the first page. In fact the highest ranking youtube page is this video:
Now, ranking with an individual video is fine - but it's not perfect because it's not the best page for a user to land on and also it's not ranking 1st page! So what can we do about it? Well how about we create a page which sits on this URL: www.youtube.com/videos/sports/poker-videos and is perfectly optimised for the term "poker videos" with a good title, header and intro text. Then most of the content on the page can be pulled from existing uploaded videos. So aggregating content in this way can provide you with powerful canonical pages which you can internally link to strongly and can rank for specific head terms without you having to rely on individual videos.
Being Agile & QDF Terms - The above technique can be done en masse as part of a site overhaul and I suggest that building these kinds of pages into your site as part of the category structure is a GOOD THING. But sometimes, search phrases come out of nowhere - these are the phrases that weren't anywhere yesterday, let alone 6 months ago when you did your research! Still with the youtube example, looking at the hot trends for today I see that "draft picks 2010" is a hot phrase right now:
Keeping with the youtube example I see that there are plenty of videos for the term but that's just the problem - there isn't a good single page for Google to find that is specifically about the term. So, if YouTube were being agile they could quickly deploy a page (www.youtube.com/nfl-draft-picks-2010/) targeting the term, link to it from a high-crawl page (like the homepage) and BAM they'd be ranking in no time. The beauty of this is that all they need to do is do a little picking and choosing of existing content to create the page. They don't need to write anything much in the way of original content to rank for the term. This is great for videos but applies equally to other forms of UGC and can be a powerful tool in your arsenal. QDF FTW!
3) Link Building is Hard - Get Someone Else To Do It!
This is one of the aspects that is talked about most elsewhere - widgets and embeddable goodness is talked about a lot so I'm not going to labour the point. One thing I do want to point out here is that you can apply conversion rate optimisation methodologies to your link building efforts here by improving conversion rate of sharing content. For example, YOUmoz is a linkbuilding tool for SEOmoz - so when a new YOUmoz post goes live we could set up an email that is sent to the user who submitted it which has a strong call to action to both blog and tweet about their latest YOUmoz post. This simple action might improve the link conversion rate of YouMoz posts by 20%. Boom, extra links!
4) Use Your Community To Do Research
Another way that you can use your community to help your link building efforts is by using feedback forms and surveys. For example, a site I worked on recently which let's say promotes widget expertise sent out a survey to their users and one of the questions they asked was "where else do you talk about widgets online". Some people said Facebook, some said blogs but a surprising number said they not only talk about widgets on this site but they also discuss widgets on forums. So this is a really valuable insight and should motivate you to ensure that when you offer widgets and embeddable content you also offer forum code as well as HTML to ensure that you're getting as much exposuring as possible. I can't really predict exactly what insight you'll gain from surveying your users but I can guarantee that if you do it you'll learn something about other sites in your industry, keyphrases you were missing or usability issues which can lead to conversion rate improvements.
By the way - did I mention that you should go take the SEOmoz industry survey?!
5) Educate Your Users on SEO
Not everyone in the real world hates SEOs. Shock horror! In fact, plenty of regular users are really keen to understand more about how SEO works. So running training sessions for your users highlighting in particular the benefits good SEO can bring them can really help motivate your community and helps users optimise their own content, do their own link building, keyphrase research etc.
Towards the end of last year the SEOmoz team did some work with Etsy and actually put together some training courses/videos/PDFs for the community to help users learn about SEO. Here's the Etsy Guide to SEO.
So, in summary - user generated content is a phenomenal asset, use it wisely and you will profit! As usual, I'd love to hear about other creative uses for UGC in the comments...
Users engagement is the key to getting tons of UGC on your website. So here are few more nudges just to encourage participation:
1. Give recognition to top contributors by making them featured members or by giving them special badges/titles like 'Top contributor of the week' or 'Top Commenter of the month with their photos published on the home page and some link love. Now who doesnt like to see himself on the home page of seomoz as the top commenter/blogger of the week.
2. Give due acknowledgement to your critics too. They are the one who encourage participation by challenging the poster or other members and by coming up with interesting caveats or giving new direction to the on-going discussion.
3. Provide revenue generation opportunities to contributors like ehow.com is doing.One of the best way to get UGC.
4. Encourage visitors to contribute by giving them various type of incentives like real/virtual gifts, credits, esp. discounts, offers, virtual hugs, kisses, pat on the back etc. Like rand giving pat on the back to a new member who has just made his first awesome comment on semoz blog or who came up with his first awesome youmoz post. How much this type of public acknowledgement can mean to a new member, only he can tell. No doubt this will encourage him to come up with even better comments next time.
5.Empower top contributors by making them community administrator or giving them virtual ranks like corporal, first lieutenant, captain, major etc. (got this idea from vbulletin and its works ;)
6. Remember b'days and other esp. days of your members. Post their upcoming b'days on your site and encourage other members to wish them.
7. Induce sentiments in your community by encouraging the use of emoticons esp. for -ve reps or thumbs down. Like when someone try to give thumbs down to say 'Tom' (yes you Mr. Cirthclow :-) he/she can be reminded that "this is going to hurt 'Tom'. Do you still want to hurt him". Also display some pity picture of like say crying twitter bird (which comes up when you try to cancel your twitter account). This will discourage -ve reps/thumbs down.
8. Stay and get in touch with your members esp. those who haven't logged in for ages or registered and just vanished with special mails like "We miss you" and again a pity picture.
Finally engage as much as you can with your visitors to turn them into life long contributors.
Great add on to the Tom post.
I like the last point... as UGC has to do with sentiments more than we tend to consider.
These are some great additional points to consider. Taking care of and growing a community is fundamental to any UGC website!
Definately great additions to the main post, which was a very good write-up.
I have had experience implementing #1 and it definately works. People make sure to participate so they can be one of the featured users, while no monetary value is gained, it's a sense of recongnition that people really grab at.
Hey Himanshu, all excellent additional points. I was just badgering gfiorelli1 above to post on YOUmoz, and now I'm going to start nagging you too!
Great points to add on himanshu. It was like an immedietly approved youmoz post to me. :)
I find I'm frequently recommending reason (2) on Q&A for affiliate sites and other people who repurpose content. UGC is a great way to add unique material and avoid duplicate content issues, especially if you have thousands of pages. It's essentially crowdsourcing.
Great post, Tom!
Reusing unique content is such a great way to create good pages that both users and search engines like. The thought of using existing content for QDF queries is absolutely brilliant. Will try to implement it right away!
Also asking the users where else they share their content is a very smart thing to do ;)
Thanks for the post - one of your best!
Thomas
I'm responding to this statement: "it might as well be a book instead of a website. Lame."
When I visit a restaurant I suppose the chef is in the kitchen, working his/her magic. When I visit what matters to me is what arrives on my plate.
I don't suppose/assume that my desire to engage the chef in dialogue or to deliver praise is matched either by his/her desire, his/her availability, etc.
I know you can vary the analogy and add all manner of "Yes, but ifs . . " but - truly - IF I care more about the chef's social behavior than what he puts on the plate then I daresay "I'm . . . (some version of lame)".
There's a tendency to extol "the social". Fine, I get that. I/We want our say. We want to be acknowledged. We want to add value. We . . have a 100 drives, motivations, etc. "for engagment" and easily as many rationalizations why . . social is . . better . . right . . "not lame".
But, really, to equate an absence of socialization with "lame" is . . (name calling withheld to not . . the ).
I don't care if a site "is a book" any more than I care if the chef likes to come out of the kitchen. IF the content of the site holds value . . and "is a book" . . I won't put it down IF it's a good read.
Books are far from lame if they're well written.
And, yes, "GO SOCIAL and SEO IT!" . .
Argh . . I feel so warm and fuzzy . . , no, jk, I feel so pimped . . . when "social"="money", which so much of social media marketing devolves down to, i.e., contextualizing my participation/contribution in terms of any economic advantage that may be derived . . from my free/freely given . . contribution.
Tom C, excellent refresher, I'd say Two Thumbs Up but this thing only lets me give you one. To me the most valuable part of your post is the reminder to SEO user-generated content, i.e. that it in the way SEO treats all useful content.
In addition to the various excellent specifics, reading your post made me suddenly realize a general point that I guess should have been obvious but didn't fully occur to me till now, namely, how closely related and similar user generated content baiting (to coin a term?!) is to link baiting, and how they can and should go hand in hand. The best way to "seed" (provoke, elicit) user generated content is with material that is also excellent link-bait: interesting, topical, controversial, humorous, unique, extra useful...
Not to mention the fact that users who proudly contribute excellent content to a site will themselves link to it (I know that I do!).
In a word, for SEO purposes UGC and link baiting are two sides of the same coin.
In terms of nudges, i like the way thegumtree do it in their property upload pages
https://www.gumtree.com/cgi-bin/add_posting.pl?is_agent=0&posting_cat=1 if you go there and click in a field, you get a handy SEO-wise pop up nudging you to provide info in a seo friendly way
I think its a very nice example of usability combined with seo
Building this into your UGC seems like a big win to me
Edit: Am i missing how to turn that into a clickable link?
That's a fantastic example which really highlights exactly what I was talking about - thanks for sharing :-)
Echoing the comment of AC Contributor: great post.
I agree with you that UGC content is one of the keys that can differantiate one successful website from a wannabe a success one.
I do really liked your YouTube suggestion, as it can offer so many options for quality link building.
Infact, we can play on parallels with this tecnique with every Video website, for instance Vimeo.
More over... we can use this tecnique in order to start a contact with the creators of those videos, play with their vanity:
for instance, you can create a web page for a travel agency site about those destinations which are the core of your business. The same fact that you are 'advising' the owner of the video that you're going to use his video can open you the door to receive a backlink from his own site/blog or whatever online presence he has.
And obviously, very good is the "Link Building is Hard - Get Someone Else To Do It!" suggestion. Using again the travel agency website example, to give the opportunity to your visitors to share experiences, suggestions or, why not, creating a subset in the website called "Travel Blogs" totally UGC, using CRO and "old school marketing", as a yearly popular contest to vote the best travel blog hosted on your site.
Again, thanks Tom for another great post.
As always G, excellent points. I am positive you have at the very least a half dozen YOUmoz posts inside that brain of yours.
I know this post is mainly about UGC but as video is used as the main example, have to mention that getting time to transcript some videos can :
*get it more exposure
*act as additional source of information
*make for better user experience as some would not have volume or a player to get info.
That's of cause only relevant if there is text to transcribe :-)
You sir get a thumbs-up for making use of OMG cat. That kitty = so much win.
Hey Tom. There have been so many excellent comments, that about all I can add that's original is my thumb up :)
Tom,
Fairly new to the site but enjoyed reading your post. You write precise , clear , easy to understand where most people can easily read and grasp the content. With that being said, great article.
In recent years, multichannel retailers like Walmart, Best Buy and many others have embraced user-generated product reviews as an effective social media tool to increase conversion rates. The benefit is that in exchange for giving customers a forum to share their product experience (positive or negative), the merchant receives unbiased “voice of the customer” content that helps sell prospective customers. (And be honest, you have to respect a brand like Cabela’s willing to allow comments like “this thing sucks” live on the website.) All kidding aside, brands need to consider the risks with these systems and have a strategy to achieve high customer adoption. But in nearly every case we’ve encountered, the process works very well.
Hardest part is to get people's involvement into community, website, forums , blogs etc however if the right set of platform is given to them along with ideas to write about, I think UFC can be a huge hit.
Tom, this is a great post! However, for number 1 you talk about video marketing, would you say that we need backlinks for Youtube videos to gain more popularity? I have this Youtube video about Pleasanton Marketing, however I have not done a lot of video marketing and am not sure at how to approach this type of SEO. Would love for you to respond with a solution to this problem :)
[link removed]
Thanks for the great post. Will definitely try your UGC suggestion.
thanks
One more incredible post from your side Tom.I always like your writing style and this topic added value to it. UGC for a business is nothing but just creating opportunities for consumers to create and share content and every consumer will love to do it.
Valuable guide for seo again.
Thank you for the great post and wonderful ideas. Now to put them to work.
i really like your post - wenn done mate! Keep up the good work
How do you track and measure 'link conversion rate'?
I use Tynt Insight to track content re-distribution and insert a cheeky link back,but you can track number of links to particular posts using google webmaster tools.
But I think as with any other conversion - link conversion can be measured by the amount of visits verses the amount of link backs to the post.
I think that UGC is great, and definitely feel it's the key to helping build a website while getting some great SEO value by letting your users do some of the heavy lifting.
I have a question though. Are there any good examples of this for B2B companies? I guess technically you could say SEOMoz, but what about outside of the SEO industry? Especially for industrial market companies selling services. These are mainly the types of companies we work with and I haven't seen a good way to go about getting UGC to work on sites like this.
Travel sites like tripadvisor.com mainly depends upon UGC for its contents and get more than 30 million unique visitors per month.
Totally right...
another great example is Yelp.
And UGC is also behind the secret of the success of consumers' sites like Ciao (now Bing Shopping in the US), Kelkoo (that has an interesting use of recicling already existing content)...
That definitely is a good example. But I'm thinking more along the lines of sites that you would fine by searching through the ThomasNet directory (thomasnet dot com). These are the down and dirty industrial companies that build the machinery, the gears, the parts that make the widgets, etc.
TripAdvisor and Yelp (as @gfiorelli1 points out) have a lot that users can talk about, give feedback on, etc and something we've almost come to expect.
For B2B websites... why not thinking in UGC Niche Blogs?
They could be a "meeting point" beetween Clients and Producers of the good.
In the blog the UGC content could be produced by all the engineers, commercials and clients... 'writers' from inside the industry and from outside.
For instance, if the business is producing and selling hard stuff, the blog could be about all the hard stuff that can be assembled using their components... the research of new materials... success cases... clients' cases explained by the engineering dpt. of the client... stop me, or I'll continue rambling.
Nice post, would be interesting to hear some real world feedback regarding the interest level of learning basic SEO from in house copywriters/users who generate content for their company.
I think the education aspect of your post is probably the most influential part. If you can educate those who take an interest they will likely implement your teachings and you'll yield a decent SEO return!
Best,
I'm not a "direct feedback", but i can assure - from my experience with several companies that actually have a real in-house PR dpt., that the "copywriters" are the first one asking me: "How can I write what I write in order to make it relevant in Internet".
The fact is that had proven on their skin that to be a great journalist is not enough without a minimum knowledge of SEO Copywriting, that's why they ask.
More over, many are enthusiast young people willing to know also to expand their career opportunities, therefore - once you've "open their eyes" - they are very willing to learn.
Great post Tom! I actually do a ton of writing for Associated Content and they apply many of these techniques. Personally, when I write for them, I rarely use the Google hot topics/trends and I don't really use the QDF concept but I'm definately going to try it out to see if I can get some quick buzz to my profile. Thanks for the great tips!
Wow! Thanks for such great tips.
I notice that some of them obviously require to be already established in your niche (For example, those which make use of "your community"), but I'm looking forward to experiment a few of them on my own blog!
Thank you Tom!
This blog is a great evidence that user generated content is quite important.I guess the percent of people that come from search directly to this blog is huge.
These tips of seo certainly help who want to learn seo and want to start own business . Such tips not eassy to get and to understand . This has good information about seo and how to improve you seo skills .