Search engines, mainly Google, are the first and easiest way for people to find an answer to their questions. So, what you want, as a community moderator, is to provide the answers that Google likes, or to improving the SEO (Search Engine Optimization)! But how can you do that?
Well, there are some simple tips you can use to improve the quality and the visibility of your contents. Quality of your answers is the main reason that keeps your members happy and motivates more people to join your community. In this article, I am sharing some tips to prepare the highest-quality and SEO friendly answers for your community.
1. Do the keyword search: You need to know what keywords people search a lot on Google. Use those keywords in your community contents, including questions, answers, discussions, or even topics. It makes your community more visible on Google. There are some softwares in the market that can help you to find the valuable keywords and the long tails.
2. Give a brief and a clear answer in the first paragraph: When people search for a question, what they see in Google index is a part of the first paragraph of your answer (first 300 words). People are more likely to open a link with an introduction that gives them exactly what they want. So, forget about starting your answers with a very general, long, and boring introductions. Give people what they want and bring it to the very begging of your content.
3. Know your audience: Sometimes community moderators forget about who their real audiences are. You are writing for regular people, not for Google or some sort of robots. Give a sense of comfort to your writings. Also, remember that not all your audiences have the same level of knowledge on all topics. Make your answers understandable for the majority of people. Of course, this factor really depends on the type of your community and your members. For example, in a community for computer programmers, technicality would be the nature of the posts. Therefore, you need to make the answers compatible with the type of your community and its members.
4. Your answers should be long enough: Longer answers (article) are more appreciated on Google. Try to write the answers with at least 500 words. But never sacrifice quality for the quantity. If the answer for a question is short, that is totally fine. Do not extend your answer by mentioning irrelevant stuff in it.
5. Check and edit your answers: Read your answers a couple of times and improve it in all ways. Be careful about grammers. You can use text checking software, like Grammarly which has a free version too, to make sure your text is clear and well written.
6. Use bots to post your answers: You can use bots in your tribe community to post questions and answers. This way, not all the contents are published by one or two community moderators. By posting contents on behalf of bots, you are adding a sense of more activity to your community. Answering your own questions also, makes your answers less trustable for the audience.
7. Give backlinks to the other contents inside your community: When you are writing an answer for a question, it is a good idea to mention other relevant contents in your community. For example, if you are answering questions about "how to have a successful community", you may want to mention that there are relevant answers about "how to interact with your community users" as well. Copy the link of relevant contents in your new post. This way, your members will visit more pages on your community.
These are just a few tips. We will update the answer and will add more tips to this list. You can add your comments under this answer.
We wish you luck with content generation in your community.