How Much Content is Enough Content – Forum Maintenance
You need related content to grow – more and more of it. Webmasters go on creating pages after pages of beautiful or trash content.
Just take a look at any good forum – thousands and thousands of pages (not words alone) are being scribbled every other day with lots of emoticons.
We are getting so much of fresh content everyday. We are happy.
But have you ever wondered – how much content is enough content!
Why do we need those pages! If your only motivation is that of satisfying Search Engine’s needs – start counting – your days are numbered (did you ask why?).
How much quality information does a long thread carry! Someone, looking for some information, needs to pass through hundreds of questions and answers (related and superfluous) to get into some conclusion on the content of the thread. There is still no guarantee that the thread will solve his or her problem. It is like searching for bits and pieces of a lost mummy in Sahara.
If they are not finding answers to their own problems, they are not spending quality time in the forum – that means, they are not getting value for time.
If this trend continues, people would just become guests, who would post their problems and wait for answers – that also means that they are acting as a passive agent.
You would argue to turn a good thread into sticky – this is only a temporary solution – how many stickys would you like to have in the dashboard!
To add to this problem, the titles of threads are often not descriptive enough to reflect the content (one must remember that the title was written before the second post and it was written by a semi-conscious person).
What can be done!
My suggestion is very simple – when a thread is dead (i.e. discussions are over), turn it into an article that would include the most important points. Put a descriptive title and summary and make a different landing page with a title like “Solved Issues…..”.
What do you get!
- quality content (SE friendly)
- control over content
- organized content
- clean discussion board
- simple navigation
- better solutions to visitors
- etc.
What say you Forum Masters?
Filed under: content writing | Tagged: content, Forum
MrDoubts,
It is true that it sometimes does become difficult for a new comer visiting a form to reach the exact source of information he is trying to find.
But I’d like to add that most forums nowadays give us the opportunity to ask the same thing repetitively. So if you don’t the answer you were looking for, ask a new question. If someone wants to get different opinions on the same topic and check whether opinions received earlier in some other forum are correct or not, post in some other forum and compare the answers. Most forums do not restrict you in asking questions and how many times you ask the same thing until you are satisfied with the answer.
Search engine wise, activity in a web site is monitored. Forums give a site plenty of activity for search engines to monitor be it repetitive activity
. Another SEO aspect is number of hits site receives, well that also gets perked up if visitors start to receive proper responses. Regarding title for pages, I know a few sites where an option exists by which title can be changed from what a visitor had give. It means visitor will see the title they had given to the question but for that page, there will also be a different title which will come up in search results so optimized titles can be given to pages for better visibility in search engine results.
I partly agree with you and also disagree that forums are not useful both from SE and visitor point of view. They are a useful medium of interacting with people landing onto their websites.
Just my .2 cents
Hi Smith,
Thanks for your comment. I never said that “forums are not useful” - I was talking about increasing user’s experience. A repeated question is not a solution to the problem. I would love to get into a forum where things are at proper places.
That’s why it’s important to build an FAQ/Knowledge Base little by little. Each new question can be answered nicely, added to the FAQ, and newbies later can be pointed there each time they ask the question that’s already answered.
In time it trains the good members of a community to use resources put there for their benefit.
On the other hand I’ve seen many forums go to ‘pot’, with threads as useful as AOL Chat room logs. I thought about starting a forum, but until I’ve got at least four other people I can count on to help moderate it…I’ll wait until things are mature enough to demand it.
Thats a nice idea John. Start your forum as early as you are sure that you want to start that - a day lost is at least 24 hours lost.
You can get good moderators in your forum itself. People will be happy to moderate if you can add value to your forum. But you need to work a bit hard in the primary days.
All the luck John - just inform me if I could be of any use.
God In gave up on forum moderation and had to close them all down. Every forum was taking up far too much time and I cant afford to pay someone to do it for me. So that FAQ idea has legs and I’m away to try and get all my forums (fora sp?) back online and working. Thanks
Hi Justmarketing,
I am happy to help you - really.
[...] new team member, a man with a lot of doubts, Mr Doubts is asking an interesting question, “How much content is enough?“. He is touching a different dimension of it, let me go my own way and I will go visitor way. [...]
Wow, great question to ask. I also wrote a blog post for it http://www.idealwebtools.com/blog/howmuch-content/
I have read that post Aji and I will request all my visitors to do the same.
I think it is high time to think about sitemap in a more innovative way. What say you?
So I was off work and surfing and found this place and thought I would join up. I don’t have much more to say right now except I need to start reading some of the older posts to get up to speed before I can start posting.
Em
We are in the midst of deciding whether or not to add a forum to our blog. Thanks for the info, may give it a go and see what happens.
Hi there,
So, let’s chat! How are you?
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shopping