Presented by Guest Blogger Aaron Korff

Everyone wants to learn those “special” tricks, those little known gems, that will give them that little push over the competition. This article focuses on leveraging your content to increase your SEO. I’m going to discuss methods for two types of sites: e-commerce and SaaS (Software-as-a-Service).

My first assumption is going to be that your e-commerce site has a database. My second assumption is that your site has a brand/category drill-down feature, as well as product detail pages. The problem is that search engines don’t do a good job of gobbling up these pages, and unfortunately, the majority of your site is comprised of them. Usually they are coded with a query string, or there is a session variable controlling which product page is currently displayed. Instead of leveraging valuable keywords from your URL, you are instead showing the search engine spiders the same page over and over again.

A skilled web developer can turn those “ugly” URLs into “friendly” URLs. There are different methods and unless you are a developer, the jargon can get very technical. Suffice to say that there are widgets available that work with your Internet server to spit out friendly URLs based on a set of logic that you determine. My custom software development company, Vazkor Technologies, uses URLRewritingNet. Another popular method is Apache Mod Rewrite. As an example of how nicely this works, compare www.shoebuy.com and www.allfootwear.com. ShoeBuy.com rewrites their URLs. As you click through products and categories, you will see friendly URL names. On AllFootWear.com, you only see database codes in the URL. Obviously, database codes do not make for good keywords.

The next method for content-based SEO is a little more difficult to implement but if you have access to a decent software developer, it will be a snap. Basically the trick is to take all of those responses that you or your support staff are sending to customers who email your company with questions, and push them to your website, either to an FAQ page, a blog, or some other informational page. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways, but the easiest way to get started would be to create a special folder in your email software client (e.g. Outlook) and instruct your support staff to move every Sent Item that was a response to a customer into this folder. Then your software developer needs to write a script that will “crawl” this email folder and parse out the original question and the response your staff made. Voilà, you have a lot of juicy FAQ content for your website.

With this sort of automation you can make the mistake of pushing too hard for perfection, which will end up costing you in the end. Yes, you could develop the script to crawl the email folder, parse the content out and upload it automatically to a location on your website or to a blog. However, the smarter solution would be to inject a checkpoint into the process. I would recommend having the content dumped to a text file that can be scanned and edited before uploading. If there are any emails that weren’t of a Q&A nature, you can manually cut them out.

For SaaS product owners, there are other methods for content enrichment. With these types of products, the users need training and support, and that usually means creating documentation. Put your documentation online! I’ve spoken with SaaS owners who worry about revealing their product information to the public. They fear that their competition will reverse engineer their functionality. While anything is possible, keep in mind that your competition can always subscribe to your service and get the information anyway. In the vast majority of cases, the SEO gain from having your documentation online far outweighs the risk. As an example, at my SaaS product’s website www.enteryourhours.com, I have my documentation with all the screenshots fully exposed.

Another simple content method for SaaS owners is to create a user forum and have it open to the public. Forums work especially well if you have a decent amount of market traction. It’s a great avenue for potential new customers to ask questions, and will allow your user community to build your content for you. If you don’t have a large customer base, you might want to forego the forums, and instead offer freebies to some of your best customers in exchange for contributing to a product-review blog.

Hopefully this article has gotten your wheels turning on content enrichment. Whether you have an e-commerce site, SaaS site, or some other web presence, you should consider this one fact: Your content is all around you, but not always on your website. Be clever, and you’ll come up with your own tricks. Get a scanner with OCR (optical character read) and scan your printed content. Rummage through all of your word documents and see what you find. If a customer gives you a testimonial over the phone, ask them to send it in an email so you can post it online. Be vigilant, and get into good habits, and you’ll have a content-rich site in no time!

Author: Aaron Korff