Sites are always trying to rank higher in search engines. The best way to rank well is to have well written, original content that sites want to link to (this is the non-spamming technique). This is why many web optimizers push you to have a blog on your site. A blog will generate new, original content (hopefully). The problem is, depending on your sites focus, there are only so many articles that you can write that are quality and relevant to your business.
There is another way to generate new, original pages and your website members will do it for you. A member profile can be a very powerful SEO tool. I like to call it “Profile SEO” or “Name SEO“. If you search a name in Google, like mine, you will find profiles that I have signed up for (Linkedin and the Go BIG Network) as well as profiles that I did not create (Spock). These profiles are an excellent long tail SEO tactic for a website. Anyone who searches my name to find out more about me will most likely check these sites first.
In large quantities, Profile SEO can be a significant percentage of your organic traffic. LinkedIn has roughly 15 million members. That is 15 million unique pages that will draw organic traffic. This tactic only works if members use their real names. In the current social/business network environment, it is not difficult to ask members to use their real names. LinkedIn, GoBIG and Facebook all use real names for their profiles and people in general are comfortable using their real name on the web.
You don’t have to be a large social network for this to work. Smaller sites like BoredSketchbooks.com use their artist galleries to optimize for names. If you search for artist Mari Sheibley in Google you will see her BoredSketchbook gallery ranks 3rd for her name. If your site doesn’t use member profiles, you can highlight yourself and your team in company bios. These can be linked off of the site map so the search engines index them.
The reason this tactic works well in the search engines without much link building is most people don’t have 10 optimized web pages (most search engines have 10 results per page) for their name. Where this does not work is common names (John Smith), and people that are written about often. In those two circumstances your pages will need to have solid links to rank competitively.
