As a site owner, you understand the importance of quality content. It's what helps to get you to the top of the search engine results pages. You don't need to write all of your own content to accomplish this – but don't think that means you'll get out of working for it.
I'm talking about user-generated content, of course. This kind of content gives you something your competitors don't have. But that's not the only reason you should enlist the help of users and visitors to your site to add content.
When visitors to your site leave comments in your forums or on your blog posts, they use their own terms for your products and services. This can help you tremendously with keyword research.
User-generated content can provide other users with valuable information about your products and services. Sure, there's the classic case of new forum members asking questions and getting answers from more experienced members. But that's not the only way to use and present user-generated content helpfully.
Amazon handles UGC wonderfully. I searched there recently for a DVD video series to give a friend as a gift. As soon as I clicked through to the product, the e-tailer showed me links to the “most helpful favorable review” and “most helpful critical review,” with a paragraph from each and the option to click through to read the full review. That's an awesome way to give users exactly the kind of information they need, when they need it, using user-generated content.
So how do you go about capturing this kind of action for your website? As Eric Enge noted as a guest writer at Search Engine Land, you can't just slap up some text. “Take the time and effort to figure out what content will add value to the user experience on your site,” he wrote.
If you're running a website that caters to amateur or professional cake decorators, for example, do your readers want to share recipes? Talk about techniques? Review cake decorating kits? Think about what your visitor is trying to accomplish, and then structure the UGC on your website to make it easier for them to get their tasks done. Again, it's hard to top Amazon here.
If you already have a blogging platform and lots of traffic, you're ahead of the game here, as your users probably leave comments. Blogging platforms automatically come with commenting platforms. Enge notes that you'll also want some anti-spam protection in place; you can get a free system such as Akismet.
But this isn't your only option. Enge points out that the Facebook Comments platform is also worth considering; indeed, it's used by Techcrunch. It offers certain built-in advantages, according to Enge: “Facebook Comments provides a certain amount of natural anti-spam protection as you need to be logged into your Facebook account to use it. This certainly gives users with real accounts an incentive to avoid being a spammer with their accounts. Likewise, Facebook has a strong motive to remove bad accounts as well.”
Search Optimization 
