FAQs about SEO


Established or mature communities create an enormous amount of content on a monthly and even on a daily basis. High content volume alone, however does not guarantee higher positions in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). In fact, organic traffic growth tends to follow a trend of high growth during the first one or two years of community building, followed by stubbornly low growth thereafter. This is not a trend that can’t be overcome and the purpose of this article is precisely to show you how you can invigorate your organic traffic growth.

 

How do search engines view and rank my community content?

Trying to decipher the algorithms used by search engines is an impossible task. We do know however that there are specific aspects that consistently appear to have a positive impact on community content.
For existing content there’s a lot you can learn about how well it performs in SERPs and more interestingly about the authority that search engines give to your community’s content.
This article addresses 9 key questions about how search engines view and rank your content.

 

Do home and category pages matter for SEO?

Yes, they do. There are several reasons that explain why this is the case. The main one is that your homepage appears in search queries that tend to have high volumes--meaning that many people search for these terms. Some of these search queries include: community + your company name, support + company name, help and support + company name, product name(s) + company name, etc.
The variety of these search queries may be small but the quantity of people searching for them tends to be quite high, which is why they matter; each of this queries may represent 1000 visitors or more during a single month.
A second reason is that your homepage acts as a source of backlinks to all your topic pages, so search engines see your homepages as a nice index leading people to an enormous amount of user generated content.
Unlike homepages category pages don’t have the same SEO power. They are unlikely to appear in many SERPs and they are very unlikely to be part of the top landing pages for your organic traffic.

 

Do public tags matter?

Public tags have a mild positive effect. This means that while they will help search engines order and understand your content, they are not determinant of your topics’ SEO power. It remains the case however that using public tags in a consistent manner throughout all your community content will have the highest impact on your overall SEO.
Keep in mind however that public tags do play a significant role on internal searches and on the functional role of tag cloud widgets within a community.

 

Do best answers improve the SEO power of your topics?

In the inSided communities right answers within a question topic can be ‘marked as best answer. From a structural point of view, the correct answer is copied underneath the initial question. Our research has found that topics with a marked best answer have higher SEO power than topics without a best answer. Right answers are also important from a content relevance point of view. Users find such topics more relevant, inasmuch as they provide on-point answers to specific issues.
However, the SEO impact of topics with a marked best answer is small. It is the combination of both best answers and relevant public tags that has the highest positive effect on SEO.

 

Are user generated topics better for SEO?

Yes! They are very important and you can definitely take as a positive sign if most or all of your top ten landing pages are user generated topics.Therefore it is important to have a good activation strategy in place to stimulate interaction.The combination of right answers, relevant public tags and user generated content is a winning one to ensure that your community content is SEO proof.
A word of caution: This does not mean that moderators or community managers shouldn't generate topics. It means rather that a healthy established community is one in which the vast majority of topics are created by regular registered members. It is important to notice the term established in the previous sentence as with beginning communities moderators, community managers and content creators play a crucial role in creating the starting content for the community.

 

Do topics with external links have a better SEO power than topics without hyperlinks?

No, they do not. While external links may be recommended by some SEO specialists, the fact of the matter is that within communities external links don’t have any effect (neither positive nor negative) for SEO. Do keep in mind, however, that SEO is not the only criterion that determines your content quality. In this sense it may still be useful to add hyperlinks to topics and comments, if they will help increase its relevant for users. Sales attribution can be another valid reason to add external links to your community topics.

 

Does your community structure have an impact on SEO?

A community’s forum structure can vary greatly, depending usually on the size and the age of the community. Older and larger communities tend to have more category sets and category set groups, which allows them to accommodate more thematic variation. While it is common that some forums are more active than others, the important SEO related question is whether a larger forum structure is better for a community or whether a more focused approach works best.
The number of category sets in your community is less relevant than the actual thematic variation and the volumes of content published on a daily basis. What really matters is how your community's content is distributed across its different forums. As mentioned earlier it is normal that such distribution is unequal, yet it remains the case that your community will have more SEO value if its content is less concentrated. A simple rule of thumb may be useful here:
A community's top ten category sets (in terms of content) should not aggregate more than 75% of the total content published in your community. If your community is small, having less than 10 category sets, then apply this same rule by focusing instead on the content in your top five category sets.


3 replies

Userlevel 3
Badge +1

I have heard that Google ranks nowadays blogs (articles) higher than forums (discussions). So it means that random blog might rank better than big community?

 

If you think about Insided platform, there is no blog format as is, there is only forum. You can still write articles but it still looks like discussion.

 

From Google’s perspective, is there any difference between Insided platform and discussion or article? If not and if Google ranks blogs higher than forums please build blogs for as to use ASAP :) 

Badge +1

Hi @revote,

Could you link your sources please? I’d be eager to learn their view on things. In general the answer is: “it depends”, the good old consultant cop-out 😁

That said, blogs might rank higher, but this will be due to a myriad of factors, not just “it’s a blog”. Product updates and articles are very blog like, it is a well known industry best practice to take inspiration from top-topics to create e.g. knowledge base articles.

Don’t forget that the O in SEO stands for Optimisation. Covering the basics (which inSided does out of the box) and generating content comes first 😊

Userlevel 3
Badge +1

Hi @revote,

Could you link your sources please? I’d be eager to learn their view on things.

I have read about this in a certain Finnish article, it doesnt have any source link what clarifies their statement. That´s why I wrote “if” :)

Don’t forget that the O in SEO stands for Optimisation. Covering the basics (which inSided does out of the box) and generating content comes first 😊

Yeah, content what people searches and find useful.

BTW, about the inSided platform, it doesn´t have article level SEO optimisation options. Meaning, there is no option to add each and every article their own meta description nor SEO title. If you have them it doesnt mean that Google always follow them, they use their algorithms anyways but we should try to make an effect to SEO with the article level options.

Reply