The best way to get massive amounts of content is getting others to write it for you. Letting you sit back and worry about the next site that you�ll be launching. Convincing users to write good content for you can be a tricky business though. I believe in a few good methods for doing this.
- Social sites, forums and or web communities.
- Accept article submissions with back links to the authors site.
- Accept photo submissions with descriptions and user responses if the topic of the site allows it.
Article submissions
It's one of the best ways for to get back links, posting articles on high pagerank sites which allow the placing of links to the authors personal web site. We have probably all done it once, I certainly have and you definitively should. We at seomagnifier.com offer you the benefit of a relevant backlink from the root of our site un till other articles push you down below number 10, after that the relevant backlink will remain implemented in our article section. Sounds like a great deal does it not. Well this is what we offer and this is also what you should offer your users. Submission of articles can be as easy as sending the articles through the mail where the administrator posts the article in the content management system. Or as techy as a full blow automated article submission system for trusted users. For smaller web sites i would recommend using the first approach, as it gives you full control of the articles on your site. The problem with the very large sites is that you might get flooded with so many articles that an automated system can help you out.
A short reflection:
- The good thing about author sites is they are usually nicely related to your own site and sending out links to those sites can't be a bad thing seo, user wise.
- People like to read the thoughts of other users in their online community, this is what you can offer them through article submission.
- The author of the article might even place an organic link to your site in order to boost the traffic to his own article.
Photo submissions
Photo submissions can be a tricky one but might well be worth the effort in the long run. If the site in question reflects a topic that allows for Photos to be taken it can be a great way to get inbound traffic from google image search. Google image search lets users find images much like text. It is as google says themselves "The most comprehensive image search on the web", you can find google image search under it's pretty good and I use it a lot myself looking for pictures.
Now back to the topic at hand. If you have a web site that covers lets say for example travel to Belgium or any other country in the world for that matter. You have a great topic for users to "show of" the trips they made on the internet, and get credit for it by others. The tricks is not just to let people submit the Photo and that is it. No you want content surrounding that photo to get a good listing in the google image search. The image search uses the content surrounding the photo to get a clue as to what the image is about. As we all know google image bot is just as blind as the standard google bot and will be unable to view our nice image. So the thing you want is that the user that submits his image describes and names his image. That is let him define a name, title and a description. Let this user boast in this description about what ever he or she likes about this picture. Then we want to get us some feedback on the work, so that the user that just posted his very nice picture can feel good about himself. So we add a simple piece of software that lets other users give feedback on the picture at hand. This all takes a good developer about a day or 2 and won't be the biggest investment you ever made.
Displaying the photo and its information.
So we have our photo, name, description, title and feedback so now how do we display this. Well it is not hard and rather logical.
- The description goes around the photo and the first 300 characters should be placed in the meta description tag for reference.
- The title for the photo goes as a h1 tag above the photo and inside the title tag of the page, put it in the alt tag just for good reference.
- The name will should be used in the file name.
- The user feedback will be displayed with h2 tags for the title and p tags for the feedback text. Do not include dates and that kind of stuff, just display the user name at the end of the text.
That's it, remember though that the google image bot is a real slow indexer and it can take up to 6 months for the photos to appear in the google image search.
Social sites, forums and web communities
They need some sort of social attachment to the site. Web communities set up properly and with good administrators work very well. Examples of this can be found all over the web. You want the user to accept your site as his personal social network. A small site with a solid group of users that are offered an administrative status can grow very rapidly. Make them feel its their site not yours, you will benefit greatly.
So what social software to use?
Which software you use while setting up this social network of content authors can be very important, as you want this content to be easily accessible to the search engines driving traffic
A web forum is usually a great place to get people to write just the content you want, a common question followed by a comprehensive amount of answers. There are some problems though with this content:
1) Most of the forum software is not optimized for the spiders. It would be nice if there was a piece of forum software that is optimized for the serps.
2) The information is mostly unstructured; users usually create a chaotic blob of content.
3) The information offered is not necessarily true and free of copyright.
An other way is to offer a system where chosen users can post informative articles, like the ones you are reading right now. With this system its the content can be very easily structured and optimized for the search engines.
