User-Generated Content Requires a New Kind of SEO
Posted by ryan_wetpaint on September 24th, 2008 
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Injecting user-generated content into your site will make you think of your search engine performance differently than you may be used to. With your current editorial content, you’re likely targeting specific keywords or phrases that perform well for your industry. Every one of your competitors is doing the same thing, which makes for oversaturated search terms. User-generated content, however, will push up your rankings on many of the smaller terms, effectively capitalizing on the long tail of search engine queries.
Think of it this way. Your editorial content may be targeting “cooking” or “cajun cooking” as extremely relevant keywords for your site. These terms have many sites vying for the top of page one in search results. However, your user-generated content will contain phrases like “andouille spicy dinner“ or “roux thickening agent” because those are the terms that reflect how users think. Then, as other users search for Cajun knowledge, they’ll use similar terms because they think the same way. This brings them to your community, where they will add more and more of these user-centered phrases.
In effect, your existing community creates content that attracts like-minded users to join them. These users not only find the information they want, they also find an active community that shares their interests. This feedback loop motivates the creation of more content and user participation.
Weptaint offers many recommendations that will help your user-generated content receive the attention it deserves from search engines. Pay attention to these three key areas:
- Content source-ordering. Search engines often prioritize content that is presented earlier in the source code of your page than content presented later. This does not mean that you need to redesign your site to place your user-generated content; content in your pages can be ordered differently in the source than how it appears. Through the use of CSS floats, you can move your user-generated content higher in the page than static or navigational content.
- Link your user-generated pages. Your users will create pages and subpages that follow a folksonomy that makes sense to them (and may be entirely different than your own editorial taxonomy). These pages must be linked to and from the existing pages on your site via navigation, breadcrumbs, and auto-suggested links in the content.
- Optimize your URL patterns. There are many tricks to ensure your URL is effectively representing the content of your pages. With user-generated content, you can include your existing site structure in the URL pattern, which will help the search engines “cluster” your data into related groups.
Learn more recommendations to optimizing your search engine performance at http://www.wetpaintinjected.com/page/SEO+Recommendations.
Keyword Tags: best pracitices
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