Amazon is a website that is perennially at the top of Google’s rankings – for its popularity with customers of course; but as those in SEO know, Amazon’s pioneering efforts in allowing customers to rank its products, and write reviews, have given the site a boost in a way that only a constant stream of new content is known to be capable of doing. Amazon realizes that an active user community on its website helps newcomers trust the company more. In a recent move, they’ve started a program called Vine that helps reward the best contributors to its website, with free products.
SEO is usually is all about paying attention to every last word that is published on your website: you have to be careful that the right keywords come up often enough, and so on. Using user generated content is a new kind of SEO though. You are supposed to exercise your SEO while you trust other people to do the right thing while you have only a moderate degree of control over it. You usually need to pay attention to areas like seeding the forum when user input thins out, and judging to see whether there are enough tags and other opportunities at interlinking the content generated. There is actually a software product that helps you analyze the user content on your forum; it is called Leximancer. It helps you analyze your user content to see how often your targeted keywords turn up, and analyze link ability in those keywords. You could easily check, for instance, how often a brand or product that you promote, comes to be associated with a positive or negative term. It also helps you gain some insight into the psychology of your visitor by analyzing the content for you.
Software like Leximancer also helps you moderate your forum by giving you some tools in text mining. On a very large forum with hundreds of pages of user generated content,you can easily zero in on hecklers, bullies and people who break your rules for, say, family-friendly content. With the way webmasters race for fresh avenues in obtaining free content, user generated content and software to manage it effectively,certainly deserves a close look.
Launched with a lot of hype in early 2009,
Google has a new search product out; and it is here just in time for the holiday shopping season this year. The problem that the product has set out to solve is the lack of an effective search technology that is customized to retail and business. Google certainly offers a generalized search function to any website that cares for it and pays to have a Google-powered search-box on its website. But this new product, and it’s called “Google commerce search,” is specifically built to help with retail.
It used to be that you would expect to have an e-mail account or three, you would receive a few messages everyday from work or from your friends, you would sniff when you saw the Spam folder say “100 New Messages”, every week, and you would consider your e-mail existence pretty fulfilling. On the other hand, there is life on the Twitter and Facebook plane that sees your Inbox full with wonderful emptiness every 15 minutes. The social media craze has not gone unnoticed as a potential area to capitalize on, in the search engine war between Bing and Google.