What are the most effective SEO methods for online communities and forums?

[ScrumAlliance]

My company has a global online community of over 350,000+ members.  We allow users to submit articles revolving around the scrum and agile framework.  Sometimes the submissions become overwhelming and I am curious if there is anyone out there who may have experience with this same scenario.

I don't want to place meta data on every single article that comes in, because I don't have the resources nor time to optimize each and every article.  Does anyone have techniques or suggestions in regards to either leaving the meta data untouched or customizing each individual piece?

Any thoughts or ideas will be extremely helpful.

Thanks

[webtheoria.com]

You could basically ensure that those who are submitting these articles are optimizing the work for you. Am referring to basic on-page optimization on at-least having an appropriate:

• meta title, which that would be the article name, or the first 40 characters of the article name + your forum name.
• Heading 1, which it will be the name of the article
• Heading 2 will be the sub headings, etc
• If the user is adding an image he can add some text to describe the image (thats you alt tag)

I believe the above are the very basic things you could ensure that your submission template does for you by default. Now as for the link coming to this page 'article page' make sure its keywords based link, article name for example.

[JVRudnick]

well...then again (this is the programmer in me speaking!) you could always "force" submission compliance by building in scripting to ensure that ALL those items are completed by the submitter themselves - else the SUBMIT button remains grayed out....

would work. have built them myself. you could eLance or oDesk it too....

[94501]

In addition to the on page optimization suggestions above...

I work in an online forum with 70,000+ members and have found that it still requires me to think of new discussions and posts in terms of "what search is this discussion a good response for?" Without relevance to a search opportunity (keyword research), it won't perform to it's potential. Of course, with user-generated content, not all of it fits with an opportunity. So, I try not to think of it as an orphanage where I have to get each discussion adopted/search productive.

I've also had to be careful with submitted articles, which are often duplicate content first published somewhere else. There are ways of dealing with this that still allows for good content to be posted, even if it is duplicate. Of course, if not dealt with already, it can be a huge drag on your site.

Finally, I would pay some attention to site architecture. If one's own site does not link to important pages (thus, seeing them as important and passing the link love), why would Google think they're important? So, some internal linking strategy is necessary.

Good luck!

[EricaMcGillivray]

I agree that the easiest way is to build in SEO features to your submissions. Making sure that the title translates into an H1 tag, etc. One of the reasons why YouTube became such a success, pre-Google purchase, was because every time you upload a video to YouTube, you do some SEO work: tagging the video, upload a transcript (if prompted), adding a description, etc. If you make the user interface easy to do this, you'll be ahead.

When it comes to complex schema data, I wouldn't worry as much. Most forum/article submissions rely on long tail traffic. Spend time optimizing the best traffic drives or the pieces that get the highest social shares, which might also work great on searches. It's okay to cherry pick the work when you don't have time to do it all.