Drive Traffic to Your Site through User-generated Content

If you are looking for effective ways to build quality content on your website without having to do all the work, then you can benefit from the following tips. Websites that are driven by user-generated content are often managed by a handful of administrators who just moderate the content. User-generated content can be in many formats, including text, images and videos. The prime examples of successful sites that are fueled by user-generated content are YouTube, Wikipedia and Flickr.

After setting up a stable infrastructure for the website, all one needs to do is moderate the content to ensure that only relevant content is being posted on the site. Forums, review sites, social networking portals and blogging websites are often run with minimal effort from the site operators. YouTube, the most popular video sharing website in the world, was initially launched and managed by just three people. Here are some effective tips for building user-generated content of high value:

Quality of Content:

Search engines dig content that is original and relevant. To attract new visitors and retain the existing users, it is extremely important to make sure that the content submitted by users is relevant and of good quality. However, most websites that depend on user-generated content have to deal with spammers and people who are only posting content to promote their own ventures.

While some websites such as Wikipedia allow users to contribute content without creating an account, most sites make it a requirement to avoid spamming. You can also discourage spamming by installing captcha on your website. Another problem faced by forums, wikis and blogs is that companies often contribute content solely for the purpose of SEO or promoting their brand. These submissions are usually not relevant and companies often post the same content on multiple websites. This is where moderators come in to weed out such content. A lot of websites invite their active and trustworthy users to moderate the content on their behalf.

Proper Tagging:

Once your website starts receiving lots of relevant user-generated content, the next step is to make sure that all of it is properly tagged. In addition to organizing the content on the site, it also helps search engines find and index your pages, which can be quite beneficial for search engine optimization. It also enables you to improve the search functionality within your website. For instance, it is only through tags and mini-descriptions that websites such as Youtube and Delicious are able to provide good search results. The practice getting of content tagged by an online community of volunteers in commonly known as folksonomy.

Copyright and Duplication:

Two of the major issues faced by websites that host user-generated content are copyright infringement and duplication. Featuring copyrighted material on your website can lead to serious lawsuits and conflicts with other companies. Make sure that it is clearly mentioned in your policy that users cannot upload copyrighted material and immediately remove any content that is pointed out to you by the company or person who owns it. Duplication of content can be difficult to catch but should be avoided as much as possible. Search engines can penalize you site and reduce its page rank if they find a lot of duplicate content.

Engage Your Users:

Nurturing active members can give a significant boost to content generation on your website. By encouraging, recognizing and rewarding the users who actively contribute, you can build an online community of volunteer to manage the content on your website. Try to interact with the users as often as possible and guide them on how to use your site properly. Be friendly and helpful in all your conversations and respond to constructive criticisms in a professional manner without losing your temper.

Recognize the active members for their contributions. You can even reward the users by giving them more privileges on the site. For example, Wikipedia awards badges to members who make a lot of contributions and gives them admin privileges to handle various tasks.

While most businesses are now optimizing their web pages to show up higher in search engine results, many sites have not yet fully tapped into the potential of SEO for images. If you are featuring pictures on your site that can be of value to your readers, then be sure to optimize them for all major search engines. Not only can the following SEO techniques help search engines find and index your pictures properly, but they can also bring you additional visibility and traffic.

Alt attribute: Web crawlers read the alt attribute within the HTML image tags to categorize and index images. An alt attribute describes the image and should include all the important keywords relevant to it. Here’s an example of an image tag with an alt attribute:
<img src=”http://www.myprgenie.com/images/new_home_page/logo.png” alt=“alt attribute here” width=”100″ height=”100″/>
Image name & title: It is very important to separate the keywords in the name of your images with a hyphen to make them readable to search engines. For example, image-name.jpeg should be used instead of imagename.jpeg. In addition to the keywords web crawlers pick from the alt attributes in an image tag, a lot of importance is also given to the keywords used in the image name. The title you give to a picture in the HTML image tag also helps in search engine optimization and can be seen by your readers whenever they bring their mouse cursor over the image.
Relevance & Surrounding Text: Make sure all the images you add to a page are relevant to the content on it. Search engines measure the relevance of the keywords attached to an image against the content that surrounds it. The more your alt attributes match the keywords on that web page, the higher it will appear in the search engine results. If the alt attributes of your images are not relevant to the content of the page it is being displayed on, then the search engines might consider it as spam.
The Don’ts of Image Optimization: A lot of websites used to stuff tons of keywords into the alt attribute of their images to game the search engines. However, Google and other major search engines now penalize such images by reducing their search engine ranking. Another mistake people often make while building websites that feature a lot of images is to post too many images on a page. Most SEO experts advise against this practice. Search engines also penalize images that have a very high resolution.

There is hardly anything that cannot be achieved when people collaborate on the Internet with a common purpose. The prime example of the potential of online collaboration is perhaps Wikipedia. It would never have come into being had people not contributed content to it voluntarily.

Many other types of websites and team projects also depend on an online team of volunteers to work with them as their primary staff. For example, programmers from across the globe come together to develop free software, operating systems, and applications like Linux and OpenOffice. The following are some of the popular tools and platforms that facilitate content-based online collaboration:

• Wikis: While most people think of Wikipedia when someone mentions wiki technology, there are thousands of websites that use this collaborative platform. Wikis allow multiple users to edit an article and add content to it. There is an emerging trend among all sorts of companies to create a wiki site to complement their main website. This enables companies and their stakeholders to communicate more efficiently and collaborate on crafting policies. You can even create your entire website as a wiki and let your employees and users build the content.
• Social tagging platforms: Bookmarking sites such as Delicious.com empower people to organize web pages on the Internet by tagging them with relevant words or phrases. The tags that people use most often while posting a page appear first. The practice of tagging collaboratively is known as folksonomy. In addition to fueling many social bookmarking websites, it is being used extensity by a number of music and video websites to categorize their content. If you are in the business of selling digital music, then you can benefit from this social media tool by inviting your users to tag songs, artists, and albums with the relevant genres.
• Support platforms: Websites such as GetSatisfaction have revolutionized the field of customer service. They provide support platforms that enable your users to form an online community and answer questions put forward by the new members. Support platforms allow users to respond to comments posted on your company’s profile and provide you with the necessary tools to mediate them.

Getting your key pages indexed on major search engines is extremely important for gaining visibility and traffic. Search engines send their crawlers regularly across the web to find new websites and pages. However, sometimes it takes time for search engines to find pages on their own, which is why they allow manual submission of website URLs.

But submitting your site to a search engine for indexing does not guarantee that it will be included in the search results. Most search engines do not inform webmasters if and when their pages will be indexed. Here are some useful tips for ensuring that all of your important pages are crawled and picked up by search engine bots quickly:

URL submission: Be sure to submit your website to the “Add you URL page” available on most major search engines. For example, if you are interested in having your pages indexed on Google, then you can simply add your site here: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

Content & functionality: Search engines only index websites that are functioning properly and contain some content. Make sure there are no errors on your site and don't create stub/blank pages. You can even tell the bot which pages you want to appear in the search results by setting up a Robots Exclusion Protocol for your website.

Create a sitemap (HTML & XML): Many webmasters do not realize that even after their site begins to appear in search engine results, all of their pages might not be indexed. Search engine bots usually start crawling a site from its home page and index all pages that are linked through it. To make it easier for web crawlers to reach all corners of your site, create an HTML sitemap page and add all pages available on your website to it. HTML sitemaps can also help site users with finding pages.

However, the more effective method is to create an XML sitemap file which includes all pages you want the search engine to index. It even tells search engines the exact date a page was last updated. An XML sitemap can be submitted to Google through the webmaster tools.

Invite the web crawler: In addition to submitting your URL and XML sitemap to search engines, you can also encourage the web crawler to visit your site more often by adding new content frequently. Search engines set a higher crawling frequency for websites that are updated with fresh content regularly.

If you are looking to promote your products, services or brand on the web, then be sure to explore the various advertising platforms available online before making a decision. One company’s advertising campaign might not be suitable for another as all businesses have their own marketing needs and budget limitations. Here are some of the popular online advertising platforms that can be used for most types of marketing strategies:

• Google AdWords: It has emerged as the most widely used advertising platform because Google funnels a lot of traffic and caters to an extremely broad audience. People who search for one of your targeted keywords will see your ad on the results page. Google also has the largest advertising network, which means that your ads will be displayed on all sorts of websites. This will cost you more for high competition keywords and less for long tail keywords. Google's pay per click advertising platform also includes a very powerful analytics tool that can help you track your website's conversion rate.
• Yahoo & MSN: Not only do Yahoo & MSN follow a PPC and CPM model similar to that of Google, but they are also more liberal in what they allow advertisers to include in their campaigns. Many businesses choose to advertise through Yahoo & MSN because their packages are relatively cheaper.
• Facebook & Twitter: With more than 600 million users across the globe, Facebook is fast becoming a popular advertising platform. In addition to being more affordable than Google AdWords, it also provides more demographic filters such as age, gender, and relationship status. It enables advertisers to customize their target audience with surgical precision and even has its own tracking tools. Most companies display banner ads on Facebook. Twitter, on the other hand, allows companies to promote their tweets on various twitter pages. A lot of companies are now advertising on Twitter as the opportunity of becoming viral on the Internet through retweets is just too good to pass.
• Other advertising avenues: Many companies choose to advertise on popular blogs and forums that are related to their business. However, not all websites offer this facility. Advertising on blogs and forums can be very effective as they empower you to advertise on websites of your own choice without having to compromise your budget. Online games and smart phone applications are also gaining popularity among advertisers.