How to Leverage User Generated Content for SEO

Everyone hates link building. It’s the truth. It’s tedious, time consuming and often a long-term high effort project. What if I told you there is something you can do now, today, that will drastically change the way you build links tomorrow? Welcome to the world of user generated content.

Do you think Youtube has to build links? How about Facebook, or Twitter? How about Digg or Amazon? The answer of course, is no. While you may say “But, but, but they’re huuuuuge!” Yep, they sure are — but they didn’t start out huge. What do these sites have in common? They’re Web 2.0 (admittedly, amazon is kind of a stretch). More specifically, they’re built on user generated content (UGC).

What is user generated content? Any content that is just that, generated by users. Youtube allows users to upload videos. Twitter allows users to post status updates. Facebook allows users to do similar and network with friends. Amazon allows users to sell, review and discuss products.

Now for our efforts we’ll assume there are two types of user generated content to leverage: autonomous UGC and marketable UGC.

Autonomous UGC is something like Youtube or Blogspot. Users post content and then they will promote their own content. Others will promote the content as well without any real incentive on behalf of the site. Essentially, with autonomous UGC, links are built for you, naturally, automatically. Sites like this leverage their users for content, links and promotion.

Marketable UGC is a bit different. A site like Amazon (or any ecommerce site) doesn’t get links because of their reviews.. but they rank for a variety of terms through them (and build trust, authority and a variety of other things too). They leverage their UGC primarily for its intrinsic value.

Autonomous UGC is obviously the goal here, but in the case of an ecommerce site, it’s just not likely. However for the more adventurous of us, here are a few ideas:

• Create a “widget reviews” site and create a badge of some type (or automatic notification sent to brands mentioned) to acquire links from competitors to redirect or pass link juice to your main site.
• Create a section of your site to allow users to upload content of them using the product. This works well for musical instrument retailers or food sites. Often the users will do this and promote it on their own.

Here’s a real life example for you, regarding the SEO for Associated Content — From SEOmoz Comments:

If you run an article directory or media outlet online, collect email address for web sites that are mentioned in your articles. For instance, when I was doing SEO for Associated Content – www.associatedcontent.com – one of the best link-building tactics I used was to send out “Local Top Ten” article requests to our authors. After receiving a hundred or so articles, each discussing ten small businesses (most of which had web sites), I would find the business’ web site, put the email address into an Excel file and run off a mail merge that said something like:

Dear ((contact name))

This is a courtesy email to inform you that someone has written about ((Business Name))) on Associated Content, a new media outlet for the people, by the people. Your business is mentioned in an article titled: ((Article Title)) . Please point your browser to: ((article URL)).

Feel free to link to this article from your “News” or “Media” section, or send it out in your next newsletter. For your convenience, I have provided the html link code below:

((insert link with title as anchor text))

Kind regards,

Everett Sizemore

- – - – This was our #1 strategic link-building initiative and was a big help in building our more than 120,000 incoming links.

As a bonus to all of the other SEO benefits, it seems those leveraging UGC are going to be getting an extra benefit – I’ve been noticing on my sites that when someone posts a comment or review on an older page, the page jumps up in the SERPs (albeit often briefly). The caffeine update is thought to place great emphasis on freshness as well. Perhaps this ties into some type of QDF related piece of the algorithm? I’d like to hear your thoughts, or if any of you have experienced anything similar — please comment below!