For (almost) all communities, organic traffic coming in via search engines is the biggest driver for new visitors. Search engines like Google love community content, it naturally ranks high in search result pages as the content is generated from real users speaking to each other and content usually has more relevance than, say, a marketing website.
This does not mean you should sit back and relax—it is highly recommended to optimize your community to make sure you get as many visitors possible. This 5 step guide will help you to understand why, and how, certain changes will benefit your organic traffic performance.
Step 1: Set your Meta tags right
Meta tags define how your community will be displayed in search result pages, e.g. the title of your community as well as a short intro-text:
Your community has default content for the title of your community, a description text as well as further information on category level, however it is quite generic and might not be matching what your community is about:
You can optimize the title and description of your community in Control → Customization → Site identity. If you also want to customize the meta description of your categories, then you can do this within the category settings page itself. (Control → Platform → Community → Pick a category).
Best practice here is to present the main goal / focus of your community. What can users do or expect after clicking on the link?
Step 2: Check the robots.txt file
By default, search engines will “crawl” and index every (publicly visible) page on your community. But sometimes this is unnecessary (e.g. a search results page) or even unwanted (e.g. user profiles, old content). Search engines usually have a “crawl budget” per domain and you don’t want to waste this on pages that aren’t relevant for users searching for information.
The inSided platform already comes with a standard robots.txt file, which will guide search engines and leave out most of the pages that are not relevant - so you should find that your robots.txt file is already filled by us. You can find this under Control → Settings → Robots.txt.
Is your robots.txt file empty? You can find an example attached to this guide!
But maybe you want to customize it even further, by adding some commands to further steer the behaviour of search engines. If you want to learn more about the possibilities, check out this guide from Google.
Step 3: Add a link to your sitemap
A sitemap is basically a map of all pages on your community. It helps search engines to navigate your community quicker—new content is indexed faster. Your robots.txt should already include the sitemap location, it looks like this:
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
We recommend checking this yourself to make sure you are not missing out on this. You can find more information on how to add a sitemap to your robots.txt here.
Step 4: Q&A cards / Google rich results
Did you know that Google uses your community content to highlight answered questions on a search results page? Frequently asked questions will be highlighted with the answer right underneath:
However, Google only can make use of this when it is clear what the answer to the question is. Hence, marking questions as solved will help you to increase the number of these rich results to be displayed. Our guide about marking solutions can help you to learn when something should be marked as answered.
Curious to learn how many rich results are currently loaded and displayed on search results pages? Within Google Search Console, navigate to [Q&A]. Then click on “valid” and “Impressions” to see the amounts:
Step 5: Archive old content with “No-index” & “nofollow”
Does your community have a lot of old, outdated content? This will damage your SEO and your activation, as customers will see it and click on it, but just as quickly leave the community again as they find the information is not applicable. Google will notice this and as a result your community content will rank lower overall. Therefore it makes much sense to archive certain pieces of content, in order to help more up-to-date content rank higher.
Nofollow vs. follow attributes
Old content usually has a lot of pages that link to it—think of a new user asking a question, and a super user pointing her/him to a topic where the information can be found. Search engines look at how many links are pointing to a page in order to find relevant and popular content. The downside is that this can give a boost to that outdated content which you don’t want to see ranking high in search result pages. Hence, a “nofollow” attribute can help to force search engines not to count this.
No-index attribute
Some content should not appear on search result pages at all, however you do not want to fully delete it from your community. Google recently stopped using commands to de-index content based on the robots.txt file, so we have added the option to control indexing and following directly via the category settings page (found under Control → Platform → Community → Pick a category). Now you can set up rules very easily via the “SEO settings” drop-down menu:
We recommend creating one or multiple archive categories where you move content to, should you have a feeling that it is so outdated that it will not really help any visitor. Activate the “noindex, nofollow” meta robot for this category, and it will not be listed in search result pages any more.
Be careful moving popular topics to an archive category. Sometimes it is better to update very popular topics instead of hiding them, as this could damage your overall traffic. Google Search Console can help you to identify high-performing content.
There you have it, 5 steps to making sure you’re on top of SEO for your community. We hope you found this guide useful, as always if you have any questions please reach out to us. We are constantly updating our SEO features to make sure your community adapts to the ever-changing world of SEO, if you have any suggestions for us, let us know on our community!
