User generated content is simply the comments, reviews and feedback left by visitors to your site.

So, why is it so important?

First, it’s free content for your site or blog. You didn’t have to write it or take the time to come up with the ideas.

Second, those impassioned contributors are actually free marketers for your site (so you want to nurture them and cultivate them!).

Third, it generates credibility and demonstrates the usefulness for your site. As SEOs tend to preach, content is king and the more good user generated content the search engines find, the better they consider the quality of your site.

Fourth, the search engines love it because it feeds them rather than competes with them. In other words, more content equals more crawling.

Fifth, it provides a longtail solution for keywords. No more keyword stuffing to try to catch the longtail!

Sixth, quality user generated content makes it easier to get link love.

Finally, did I mention it’s FREE?!

So, now that you’ve got an idea as to why you should be adding user generated content to your SEO toolkit (If you haven’t, you’re going to fall behind the pack fast, so get with it!), how do you go about optimizing your site to make the most of it?

1. Consider your site’s SEO: Before you do anything else, review the optimization on your site or blog. See my post S E O 101 for basic optimizing tips.

2. If you don’t have a blog or forum, get one! This is the first step towards user generated content because blogs and forums are all about comments. If you are just running a static web site, a blog or a forum is a quick way to get started on the road to user generated content land. Better yet, get both! Do some research first and be sure the blog or forum software is search engine friendly. I can’t tell you how many help e-mails I’ve gotten from forum owners who discovered too late that their forum wasn’t and none of their content was showing up in the search results.

3. Remove fluff: Posters frequently add self-serving content, including links, which you will have to moderate. Remove it to keep your content targeted and theme centered. This also helps keep the PageRank flow where it belongs and makes the site look better, too.

4. Moderate topic titles: If a poster simply makes the title of his post “Help!” you should change it to something more keyword rich like “I need help with keyword!” where keyword is whatever the topic is.

5. Hard code main keywords: Do this to the main page of your forum or blog (H1 tags) and do the same with the title meta tag on that page.

6. Promote good comments: When you get a really good comment or post, promote it to the main page of your blog or forum and post a notice that you have done so. This rewards the hard work of the poster and they love it!

7. Offer a badge or widget: Make it easy to copy and use and include a link to your site or to the poster’s profile. You’ve seen these on all kinds of social sites. For instance, take a look at the front page to my blog, The Web Optimist. You’ll see a Recent Reader list over in the right navigation bar. That’s a MyBlogLog badge that lets you join my community.

8. Make your URLs friendly: Don’t make them a jumble of letters. Not only do readers hate that, so do spiders!

9. Have content on launch. If your site is new, fill it with content prior to going live. The quickest way to get folks to click away from your site is for it appear barren and vacant. Write content yourself, get friends and family involved, use a few syndicated articles, whatever it takes. No one wants to be the first to comment, so get some friends to get things started.

10. Automatic review e-mails. If you are an e-commerce site, send an automatic e-mail to buyers after a sale requesting a review. It works for eBay and Amazon.com!

11. Give incentives to top producers. Reward top contributors with ranks, points or perhaps discounts. Even the big boys do it. Just take a look at Yahoo! Answers, one of the biggest success stories over at the possibly-soon-to-be-bought-by-Microsoft search engine. It rewards points to contributors. Other than bragging rights, the points aren’t good for much, but that doesn’t stop folks from racking them up with answers!

If you’re serious about your SEO, you need user generated content to stay competitive. Review your site or blog today to see how you can go about adding it in the form of forums, reviews, comments and so forth. The longer you wait, the harder it will be to catch up with the pack!

User Generated Content: What It Is, Why You Want It, How To Get It is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

For instance, a site owner can create a plugin with information relevant to the site including images, phone numbers, links and other data such as reviews. A user can load the plugin from a gallery so that when the site comes up in a search result, the link will not just be a link to the site, but sort of a blended result with an image and additional links similar to what Google now serves up as One Box results.

Sort of personalized universal search results.

Yahoo! Open Search Platform will focus on “completing tasks” rather than dishing out results. Users can share results with others, add or remove enhancements or even report sites as abusers of trust.

According to Yahoo!, it’s “All about users choice.”

Site owners can add buttons, galleries and marketing info to create a richer experience for visitors. The new service, which is free, will be open to all sites by way of an API or feed upload.

More information, including example images can be found at http://tools.search.yahoo.com/open . Also see the Yahoo blog for updates.

Yahoo! Open Search Platform is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

Google – The Next Big Brother? is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

Yahoo, however, considered the practice to be spammy and redundant. Of course, when you try to ask what they mean, they basically just repeat themselves (look at our guidelines, etc.) and won’t give you any information.

We couldn’t figure out why they felt this way. Our competition is doing the same thing (and a lot worse) and Yahoo wasn’t giving them any grief.

The “redundant” part is what we couldn’t figure out. After all, our drop down navigation is in a javascript, which isn’t spiderable, so we weren’t repeating links on the page. It just didn’t make sense.

So, we’re in the process of reinventing our navigation system to make the Yahoo Gods happy and hope to roll it out shortly, but a funny thing is happening. I just noticed in our ranking reports that a lot of our brand phrase keywords are ranking well in Yahoo.

Interesting. What appears to be happening is that the main page to the Frames Direct site is ranking for search phrases rather than the actual product page. For instance, we show a #1 rank in Yahoo for “abba sagami eyeglasses” for the main FD page and it appears to be finding “abba sagami” in the drop down and is obviously pulling “eyeglasses” off of the page.

What is really interesting is that if you view the source for our main page in IE, the links in the drop downs don’t show, which would lead me to believe the drop downs aren’t spiderable. If I spider the page with my spidering software, the drop down links don’t show up, either

But, if you view the source in Firefox, the drop down links appear and you can find “abba sagami” in it. This would lead me to believe that Yahoo is suddenly using technology similar to Firefox and can find those javascript drop down links.

Fascinating. Apparently Yahoo was seeing something that we weren’t. As far as they were concerned, our javascript dropdowns ARE spiderable, meaning we were repeating links on the pages.

Wow. That put a whole new spin on things. If they had explained this, we would have seen the light earlier, but as usual, they gave an edict with no explanation and left it with that. Communication is not one of Yahoo’s strengths.

But, this makes me wonder if Google will be following suit? If so, a lot of sites using drop down javascript navigation could be in for an interesting time.

Yahoo and Javascript Drop Downs is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO