There's no question that Search Engine Optimization is BIG on marketers' minds these days -- it's a great way to engage potential customers in all stages of the sales cycle. Both researchers and decision-makers use search to make purchasing decisions for software, services, etc.
Recently, I've been thinking a lot about how online communities tie into search. I'll evolve this conversation as we go, but wanted to start putting it on the radar now so the general community can help move it forward. At a high level, how does a community fit into a company's SEO strategy? This slideshow demonstrates it:
SEO - Where Online Communities Fit In from Paul Biggs on Vimeo.
In short, the 80/20 rule applies here -- a Marketing team can focus on the 20% of core keywords that drive most search engine traffic from the likes of Google and Yahoo, and the community take care of the rest of the keywords. A company is, in essence, capturing the "long tail" of search by outsourcing niche SEO content to users, that the main site (run by Marketing) doesn't have the resources to cover.
I'll be doing some research in this vein, and present my findings in a webcast: http://www.jivesoftware.com/news/webcasts. There will also be more conversations over on Jive's social software best-practices community: http://www.jivesoftware.com/clearstep/
Paul Biggs lives in Portland, Oregon where he writes about technology, apps, and gadgets when he can find a spare second.
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