What are the most effective SEO methods for online communities and forums?
-
My company has a global online community of over 350,000+ members. We allow users to submit articles revolving around the scrum and agile framework. Sometimes the submissions become overwhelming and I am curious if there is anyone out there who may have experience with this same scenario.
I don't want to place meta data on every single article that comes in, because I don't have the resources nor time to optimize each and every article. Does anyone have techniques or suggestions in regards to either leaving the meta data untouched or customizing each individual piece?
Any thoughts or ideas will be extremely helpful.
Thanks
-
I agree that the easiest way is to build in SEO features to your submissions. Making sure that the title translates into an H1 tag, etc. One of the reasons why YouTube became such a success, pre-Google purchase, was because every time you upload a video to YouTube, you do some SEO work: tagging the video, upload a transcript (if prompted), adding a description, etc. If you make the user interface easy to do this, you'll be ahead.
When it comes to complex schema data, I wouldn't worry as much. Most forum/article submissions rely on long tail traffic. Spend time optimizing the best traffic drives or the pieces that get the highest social shares, which might also work great on searches. It's okay to cherry pick the work when you don't have time to do it all.
-
In addition to the on page optimization suggestions above...
I work in an online forum with 70,000+ members and have found that it still requires me to think of new discussions and posts in terms of "what search is this discussion a good response for?" Without relevance to a search opportunity (keyword research), it won't perform to it's potential. Of course, with user-generated content, not all of it fits with an opportunity. So, I try not to think of it as an orphanage where I have to get each discussion adopted/search productive.
I've also had to be careful with submitted articles, which are often duplicate content first published somewhere else. There are ways of dealing with this that still allows for good content to be posted, even if it is duplicate. Of course, if not dealt with already, it can be a huge drag on your site.
Finally, I would pay some attention to site architecture. If one's own site does not link to important pages (thus, seeing them as important and passing the link love), why would Google think they're important? So, some internal linking strategy is necessary.
Good luck!
-
well...then again (this is the programmer in me speaking!) you could always "force" submission compliance by building in scripting to ensure that ALL those items are completed by the submitter themselves - else the SUBMIT button remains grayed out....
would work. have built them myself. you could eLance or oDesk it too....
-
You could basically ensure that those who are submitting these articles are optimizing the work for you. Am referring to basic on-page optimization on at-least having an appropriate:
- meta title, which that would be the article name, or the first 40 characters of the article name + your forum name.
- Heading 1, which it will be the name of the article
- Heading 2 will be the sub headings, etc
- If the user is adding an image he can add some text to describe the image (thats you alt tag)
I believe the above are the very basic things you could ensure that your submission template does for you by default. Now as for the link coming to this page 'article page' make sure its keywords based link, article name for example.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is The Moz Community Rankings broken?
Not as active as I would have liked recently but still visit and login, answering a question now and again, yet I can see my profile is still listed as unranked. until recently I was somewhere around 45-49 and have been for many years - the criteria appears to be what it has for the last ten years or so. I see people with lower moz points outranking members with far more points. I can even see one with 0 points now appearing in the top 50 so my question is - is the moz community rankings broken or have I missed something? I know once before I pointed it out and it had to be fixed...input from all welcome 🙂
SEO Learn Center | | Matt-Williamson2 -
Two months into SEO and I have a few questions. Read on.
Hey Moz Community Basically, I have been suspended from my job in November (with pay) on railway. Since I have nothing to do. I came across SEO, and since then. these past two months I've been addicted! firstly, I read up on how to make money buying and selling exact match domains. I failed miserably! newbie error and I still have around 10 domains in my godaddy account 😕 Anyway, I came across moz and a few other sites i read -backlino & quicksprout. I decided to go down the root of just starting a blog on one of my domains based at the health and fitness niche, the sites alot like bodybuilding.com. So this site and SEO has kind of became my hobby as I learn. I am now a MOZ pro member and have my site on there getting weekly reports. I do alot of keyword research and I try my best to write posts on what I have researched and by using the yoast WP-pluging. I optimize my article/post. this week I had a report back from moz saying one of my keywords are #31 . So i put the term in google and go along to page 5 I think it was and there I see it. My post! yesterday I check again and its on page 3, then i see it on page 4, around a few hours later. it is back on page 5 and today. it is back on page 3?? Can somebody explain why it is doing this? Also, the keyword difficulty was 38% and theres over 3 million results for that term.. so to see it there in the top #51 was a shock, as all I have done is On page SEO. No social shares yet or Links pointing to the page. So does this mean with social shares and Links. this could easily end up on page 1? I have around 5 articles on the site so far.. all are around 1000 words each and are all optimized the same way but are not in the top #51 on google. one post has even had around 60 social shares and even flooded over 3000 visits in 2 days and still isn't ranking?? and My final long question is this.. I train at my gym and have mentioned to a few of the fellas about my new hobby and it's all I talk about. Then a week or two later, I have this Guy tap me on the shoulder as I'm working out and puts his hand out to shake mine. "hi I'm Tim. One of the lads mentioned to me that your learning SEO and your passionate about what you do". Anyway, too cut a massive story short. He told me he owns a catering company over here in the UK and really wants me to put what I'm learning into practice for his company. He's offered me a wage and commission if I start making sales through his site. Thing is I'm still new to all of this.. I said I will look at his site, his products and pick out low competition keywords. See what the keyword difficulty score is on moz, and create a blog - writing posts the same why I do on my fitness site... optimize the post, share through social networks etc, find who links to his competitors and reach out etc for links and do the broken link tactic to. Can you guys give me some advice? as i'm no big seo company. I'm also thinking of spending the next few days digging deep into google adwords and facebook ads. As I think getting traffic this way will also be good to start off with, even if it is paid. I know alot of you guys work or own an SEO company. So can you give me some points or link me to some good information on how I should do this process for my first, should I say Client? I know this Is one big Q&A.. but I'm trying to explain everything. Thanks Again. Carl
SEO Learn Center | | ashfield19841 -
How much dev knowledge as an seo do I need to know in order to make small changes on websites?
Hi mozzers I am considering learning some dev just to be able to make minor changes on websites. I love seo but will never want to be a programmer. I get sometimes frustrated that I have to request my dev colleague to make minor changes such as adding a small piece of codes to a website for verification purposes or adding rich snippet or modifying the ga code to get more out of it. I know some HTML and understands the core elements and attributes. My first question would be: what should I learn without learning A-Z of programming? My guess would be some php and? My second question: based on your answer where can I learn about these programs? Any interactive learning services such as team treehouse ? Any online courses? Thanks!
SEO Learn Center | | Ideas-Money-Art1 -
Best X-Cart SEO Solutions / Modules?
We recently acquired an e-commerce client that uses X-Cart. We have no previous experience with this platform and it's hard to find any good / helpful info regarding SEO functionality online. Right now I need to figure out how to handle mass redirects of 404 errors, friendlier URLs, resolving duplicate content, XML sitemap generation, robots.txt generation. The functionality built into the platform so far is terrible and all of the modules are pricey. Any recommendations, general or specific, would be insanely helpful if anybody out there has experience with this particular platform. Thanks!
SEO Learn Center | | MichaelWeisbaum0 -
List of Local SEO business categories
Where would I find a list of the top business categories best served by local SEO. For instance dentists, plumbers, etc. I'm trying to develop a target list of business categories that I can approach and work with just 1 in each category.
SEO Learn Center | | KreativElement0 -
Does Server Speed Effect SEO Rankings?
I was told by a website developer that Google ranks sites higher if they are hosted on faster servers. Is this true? For example my site is currently limited because it is a Quick Shopping Cart site hosted by Godaddy. He said that if I hosted my research chemical site with a different company with faster servers I could get better ranking immediately. I linked to my site. I think it loads ok. However Godaddy probably isn't the fastest service around.
SEO Learn Center | | chronicle0 -
Suggestions For Our New Weekly SEO Podcast
We are getting ready to launch our new SEO weekly podcast in the next few weeks and thought I would get your opinion and suggestions on what you would want to hear. This is going to be a free weekly podcast all about the SEO news of the week, tips, what's working and what's not, and things like that.We will mainly be talking about the latest news in the SEO space on a weekly basis. Might even need a co-host from time to time. I thought I would check and see if you guys have any suggestions or recommendations based on what YOU would like to hear in an SEO podcast? I want this to be something valuable that people will enjoy and benefit from so let me know if you have any suggestions for topics we should cover, show format, etc. Thanks in advance!
SEO Learn Center | | N5c0 -
What should we include in the updated developers SEO cheat sheet?
Hey folks, Do you all remember the developer's SEO cheat sheet? It's super awesome. But it's also a little old. What super awesome ideas do you have for the updated version? What should we include? What should we take out? Any developers around - what SEO knowledge would you most like to see in a cheat sheet? Thanks!
SEO Learn Center | | TomCritchlow3