User Generated Content pretty much rules the web these days. If a website isn't including comments, blogs, reviews, thumbs up or polls then frankly it might as well be a book instead of a website. Lame. So this post is all about how to squeeze the most SEO benefit out of your user generated content.

Remember folks that even if you don't have "classical" user generated content these tips are applicable if you put out a large amount of content, regardless of whether it's UGC or in-house. If you have a team of writers you can pretty much think of them like a small bunch of users creating UGC for your site so these tips apply for many different types of sites. If these tips don't apply then you're probably running a boring website anyway. :-P

1) Nudge Users Into Doing SEO For You

This is one of the most powerful tools in your UGC armory and applies equally well to UGC uploads and also in-house content generation (how many in-house SEOs have come up against CMS limitations in teh past!). The idea is simple - firstly you need to figure out what a perfectly optimised UGC upload looks like. For example, say I was doing SEO for youtube (I'm not btw) I might consider a video like this pretty much spot on:

This video has all of the key elements

1. A descriptive title with the relevant keyphrases in there ("omg cat" and "dramatic chipmunk")
2. Submitted to the correct category ("comedy")
3. Lots of good relevant tags added (like "slack" and "jawed")
4. A good (though not actually perfect) description with the main keywords repeated on the page.

Compare that to a video like this which has virtually zero SEO value:

The video title is "640x360.mp4", there's no description and no tags.

So when you're building your UGC upload process (or internal CMS for uploading content) you need to build in as many nudges as possible to turn videos like the second into videos like the first. What these nudges might be will vary wildly and depends on your definition of a perfectly optimised page and what sort of content users are uploading. That said, here's a few nudges that you might want to consider:

• Enforce a minimum and maximum title length. This will force people to put at least a few relevant phrases in there but also avoid spamming the title with too many phrases.
• Enforce a description.
• Let users choose their own related content on the site and embed links to those pieces of content automatically. This can be a good way of increasing internal linking to strong content.
• Provide users with some popular tags they might want to use instead of letting them think for themselves.

It's important to note here that some of these changes might seem to be a trade off between usability and SEO, enforcing a description for example might lose you a few video uploads. You should carefully watch this to ensure that you don't kill conversion rates in the process and you should strongly emphasise WHY a description is important to ensure users are motivated to add one. Be sure to put the WHY in their own terms (i.e. "your video will get more views and comments if you include a description"). Linkedin does this very well with their "your profile is only 60% complete" calls to action.

2) Mash Up Your Own Content for Agile Rankings

Sometimes we get quite hung up in SEO as to what exactly we mean by "unique content". We might check for example, that an article written for a website is unique. But once we determine that the content is unique how many times can we put that article on our site? Can we re-use the headline on multiple pages? Full answers to these questions is beyond the scope of this post, suffice to say that you can often get away with re-using sections of unique content on more than one page on your site. And unique content is an asset. So consider these two situations:

Ranking For Head Terms - If your site is full of user generated content then you will naturally have plenty of long-tail phrases nailed. But what about the big terms? These terms are harder to nail down. Instead of relying on your community to optmise for this phrase, instead you can aggregate content from your community and sit it on a page that otherwise is perfectly optimised by hand. For example, let's continue looking at youtube and consider the keyphrase "poker videos". Now in the UK there are no youtube results for this on the first page. In fact the highest ranking youtube page is this video:

Now, ranking with an individual video is fine - but it's not perfect because it's not the best page for a user to land on and also it's not ranking 1st page! So what can we do about it? Well how about we create a page which sits on this URL: www.youtube.com/videos/sports/poker-videos and is perfectly optimised for the term "poker videos" with a good title, header and intro text. Then most of the content on the page can be pulled from existing uploaded videos. So aggregating content in this way can provide you with powerful canonical pages which you can internally link to strongly and can rank for specific head terms without you having to rely on individual videos.

Being Agile & QDF Terms - The above technique can be done en masse as part of a site overhaul and I suggest that building these kinds of pages into your site as part of the category structure is a GOOD THING. But sometimes, search phrases come out of nowhere - these are the phrases that weren't anywhere yesterday, let alone 6 months ago when you did your research! Still with the youtube example, looking at the hot trends for today I see that "draft picks 2010" is a hot phrase right now:

Keeping with the youtube example I see that there are plenty of videos for the term but that's just the problem - there isn't a good single page for Google to find that is specifically about the term. So, if YouTube were being agile they could quickly deploy a page (www.youtube.com/nfl-draft-picks-2010/) targeting the term, link to it from a high-crawl page (like the homepage) and BAM they'd be ranking in no time. The beauty of this is that all they need to do is do a little picking and choosing of existing content to create the page. They don't need to write anything much in the way of original content to rank for the term. This is great for videos but applies equally to other forms of UGC and can be a powerful tool in your arsenal. QDF FTW!

3) Link Building is Hard - Get Someone Else To Do It!

This is one of the aspects that is talked about most elsewhere - widgets and embeddable goodness is talked about a lot so I'm not going to labour the point. One thing I do want to point out here is that you can apply conversion rate optimisation methodologies to your link building efforts here by improving conversion rate of sharing content. For example, YOUmoz is a linkbuilding tool for SEOmoz - so when a new YOUmoz post goes live we could set up an email that is sent to the user who submitted it which has a strong call to action to both blog and tweet about their latest YOUmoz post. This simple action might improve the link conversion rate of YouMoz posts by 20%. Boom, extra links!

4) Use Your Community To Do Research

Another way that you can use your community to help your link building efforts is by using feedback forms and surveys. For example, a site I worked on recently which let's say promotes widget expertise sent out a survey to their users and one of the questions they asked was "where else do you talk about widgets online". Some people said Facebook, some said blogs but a surprising number said they not only talk about widgets on this site but they also discuss widgets on forums. So this is a really valuable insight and should motivate you to ensure that when you offer widgets and embeddable content you also offer forum code as well as HTML to ensure that you're getting as much exposuring as possible. I can't really predict exactly what insight you'll gain from surveying your users but I can guarantee that if you do it you'll learn something about other sites in your industry, keyphrases you were missing or usability issues which can lead to conversion rate improvements.

By the way - did I mention that you should go take the SEOmoz industry survey?!

5) Educate Your Users on SEO

Not everyone in the real world hates SEOs. Shock horror! In fact, plenty of regular users are really keen to understand more about how SEO works. So running training sessions for your users highlighting in particular the benefits good SEO can bring them can really help motivate your community and helps users optimise their own content, do their own link building, keyphrase research etc.

Towards the end of last year the SEOmoz team did some work with Etsy and actually put together some training courses/videos/PDFs for the community to help users learn about SEO. Here's the Etsy Guide to SEO.

So, in summary - user generated content is a phenomenal asset, use it wisely and you will profit! As usual, I'd love to hear about other creative uses for UGC in the comments...