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<div align="justify">'''1.  User Generated Content: Forums'''

You’ve seen forums on the Web such as help or discussion forums. There are forums for just about any topic, such as technical topics, health, food, games, travel and more.

A search engine friendly forum, ideally hosted on your main site, adds user generated content and often makes a site more useful at the same time. Plus, forum posts can do very well in the search results for questions people ask in search engines.

Run a search on questions about Google AdWords, Photoshop, or Dreamweaver for example, and you’ll almost certainly see listings from the provider’s help forums.

What if you’re not the provider of the product or service? It may still be worth considering a forum. Yes, the provider’s forum will likely reach the highest positions, but you may be able to reach reasonably high positions too. When I’m looking for answers for AdWords or Photoshop for example, I usually look at any listing from the provider, but I often check out answers from other forums too, where I may learn about what they offer while I’m on the forum.

'''Sell Yourself'''

User Generated Content: Forums

You’ve seen forums on the Web such as help or discussion forums. There are forums for just about any topic, such as technical topics, health, food, games, travel and more.

A search engine friendly forum, ideally hosted on your main site, adds user generated content and often makes a site more useful at the same time. Plus, forum posts can do very well in the search results for questions people ask in search engines.

Run a search on questions about Google AdWords, Photoshop, or Dreamweaver for example, and you’ll almost certainly see listings from the provider’s help forums.

What if you’re not the provider of the product or service? It may still be worth considering a forum. Yes, the provider’s forum will likely reach the highest positions, but you may be able to reach reasonably high positions too. When I’m looking for answers for AdWords or Photoshop for example, I usually look at any listing from the provider, but I often check out answers from other forums too, where I may learn about what they offer while I’m on the forum.

Sell Yourself

It helps to use a webpage template that makes it easy for people to see what you what offer while they are viewing related content on your site. You can also make people aware of products or services with messages in your page columns and perhaps a short overview about what you offer at the end of the page with links to products or services, etc.

'''2.  User Generated Content: Videos & Images'''

You can ask your site visitors and/or social media connections to submit images or videos to publish on your site, perhaps of them using your products. As we talked about in the previous article, surround videos with overview messages and ideally include a full transcript. Surround images with text descriptions and include relevant keywords. 

'''3.  User Generated Content: Ask For Feedback & Questions'''

Similar to the previous topic about videos and images, you could ask for feedback, suggestions/ideas, and perhaps ask about creative ways your products are being used and publish the responses. You might run a contest to help entice people to submit.

'''4.  User Generated Content: Article Submissions From Readers & Customers'''

You could also ask your site visitors and social connections for article submissions such as case studies, how they use your products or service, how-to articles, maybe interesting or humorous uses of your product. Publish these on your site, maybe in your blog, perhaps also on some of your social media venues.

'''5.  User Generated Content: Reviews'''

Allowing customer reviews for products, and in some cases services, adds unique, user generated content to a site and can help increase conversion rates at the same time (if the reviews are mostly good of course).

Try Amazon’s approach. They include a number of reviews on product pages where people looking at the product will find them easily which can help the conversion rate. This also helps makes the page more unique which is a typical problem for many ecommerce sites that sell the same products as sold by numerous other websites, often using the same manufacturers’ descriptions.

Amazon also includes a “read all the reviews” link on their product pages that opens another page, or more, with all of the reviews. This gives them at least two pages available to be returned in searches for the product or returned in searches for reviews of the product.

Notice they even ask for reviews of the reviews! Under each review they ask “Was this review helpful to you?” This allows them to show the most helpful reviews first which makes the site even more useful.

'''6.  Rewrite Manufacturer Descriptions'''

Do you sell product or services from providers who furnish descriptions? Make your descriptions unique by rewriting them if possible. This can help with search engine results and make your site more useful than the other sites selling the same products. Rewriting descriptions can be a huge effort for a large site, but you might start with some important products.

Whether you rewrite the manufacturers’ descriptions or not, it can help to surround your product descriptions with as much unique useful content as possible. See the next topic for more on this.

'''7.  Add More Extensive Product Information, Images, Video'''

Adding your own unique content to product pages such as user reviews, your own commentary, snippets of your helpful articles (with links to the full article), your own helpful videos and images should not only help increase conversions, it will likely help with search results by making your product pages unique from all the others selling the same products. Plus, including additional content on product pages may get your pages returned in more search results.

For many products, the Gun Dog Supply site, for example, includes much more product information and images than their competitors who carry the same products and often publish only what is provided by the manufacturer.

''Taken from http://searchengineland.com by George Aspland''
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