Online community SEO: User-generated versus editorial content

Anyone who performs search engine optimization knows that content is one of the most important components of a SEO strategy.  This is true from a user engagement perspective, for branding purposes and specifically for the opportunity to rank in the search engines.  As a social media company operating prominent online communities for Internet professionals and technology enthusiasts, iNET’s web properties consist of both user-generated and editorial content.

But which content source is truly the best for SEO purposes?  The truth is that they both are!  Both user-generated and editorial content serve unique purposes as I will explain in greater detail below.

Editorial Content – Targeting the “Short Tail”

Editorial content is usually written by the content writer (copywriter) on staff.  This type of content explains in detail your website’s products and services.  In essence, it is the true “meat” of your web site.

Within the editorial content pages, you are more than likely to target the specific ranking for short-tailed keywords – ones that are the most competitive for your market niche.  These pages are generally higher up in your navigational structure because of their importance.  In addition, they are sometimes the category pages of your web site.  In either case, it is clear based on my experience that editorial content ranks well for targeted keywords. However, SEO is not a perfect science; therefore, having a two-prong approach to content development is required to help a web site grow adequately for both short tailed and long tailed keywords.

User-Generated Content – Seeding for the “Long Tail”

User-generated content usually falls under areas of your website like forums and blogs.  It is truly impossible to target (and to know for that matter) every keyword that a user might type into a search engine to find your website.  Although a bit dated now, Google’s VP of Engineering, Udi Manber, stated in June 2007 that, “20 to 25% of the queries we see today, we have never seen before.”

Sure you can do your best to target the most popular long tail keywords with editorial type content, but user-generated content works for you without your concentrated effort.  Based on Udi Manber’s statement, don’t bother attempting to optimize for all possible keyword variations. Instead, implement a user-generated content strategy to help seed the search engines for relevant yet hard-to-target keywords and keyword phrases.

Visitors to your website probably know what they are looking for long before you ever will.  This is why much of forum traffic is the long tailed variety.  With that being said, there is no doubt that user-generated is also capable of attracting short tailed keywords because of the power of social networks.  If a user finds a blog post or a forum thread to be very useful the thread can be picked up and blogged about on hundreds of other blogs which could lead to hundreds of back links.  The end result may lead to higher rankings for all types of keywords, not even just long-tail.

Conclusion: Editorial or User-generated Content?

As stated above, SEO is never a perfect science.  Knowing this fact, we can’t accurately predict which page will rank for which keyword all of the time.  You may see your main editorial pages rank for short tailed keywords just as much as long tailed keywords and there is nothing abnormal or wrong about it.  You will also see some of your forum threads rank for some of the most competitive keywords in your industry.

So what have we learned here?  The best approach to content development is two-fold.  (1) You will want an area of your web site where you fully control and create the content to focus on the short tailed keywords.  You may find over time that it is a good idea to create a community or social component to your web site to naturally (on its own) attract the long tailed keywords.  The primary guideline to follow is to keep either type of content relevant to your market audience in order to acquire traffic and rankings across the full spectrum of keywords you have targeted from the very beginning.

Post written in collaboration with Jaan Kanellis, SEO Consultant