What SEO Practitioners Can Learn from Wikipedia - Marketing Lessons from Wikipedia Offsite Factors
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Natural links are not a problem for Wikipedia at all. The following are the important offsite/marketing lessons that can be learned:
First, there is a big advantage to earning lots of long tail traffic, because substantial and quality content are naturally given links, and these links are often "editorial links." Some Wikipedia pages have existed for more than three years, and have earned a lot of natural links.
Let's look at an example. Suppose you are interested in examining the link profile of this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_of_tea. It ranks number 1 in Google for “Health effects of tea.” When you check the backlink using Yahoo site explorer here:
You see that there are 194 backlinks from domains other than Wikipedia's. These links, when you check on them, are freely given by readers of that article in Wikipedia.
Second, Wikipedia has grown so rapidly in popularity because of its “free” concept. Knowledge is power, and everyone that is willing to be powerful simply by possessing the right knowledge, does not have to spend a dime. So they read any topics in which they are interested in Wikipedia, and start to gain more knowledge. This is why most of the successful website projects ever released focus on the “free” and “open source” concept.
Facebook is free to use, and allows users to share photos and interact socially. Google is free, and allows users to search for information very easily. The same thing is true with other big successes online, such as YouTube, Yahoo Mail and other content-based websites.
So one great tip is to offer something of value and quality for “free.” If you use this method, instead of letting users pay for your content or services, you will find that it is easier to build popularity with a large audience.
Third, Wikipedia takes the risk of granting more control to its publicly anonymous users. Any user can write content, and they might increase the risk of spam -- an issue with which Wikipedia has had to deal over the years, and still works on today. Yet this risk has a lot of benefits. Granting more control to those anonymous users attracts more users to the site, who write their own Wikipedia contributions. They feel much accomplished at the end of the day by having a Wikipedia contribution. Additionally, some of these writers are proud of their achievement, and start to link to the entry from their own blogs, or share via word of mouth (or on a social network such as Facebook).
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