The Value of Creating Content: Breaking Down Boundaries

Ask any SEO expert what the most import thing to do to insure you get plenty of traffic to your site and they'll tell you, before you worry about keywords, or H1 or H2 tags or good summaries or anything like that, it's all about good content. We've all heard it, content is king. Visitors like plenty of quality content coming out in a somewhat consistent fashion. That's why they'll come back. That's what will encourage people to link to your site and refer it to others.

To get plenty of content you need people who are willing and able to produce that content. This could be in the form of paid employees, but by leveraging Drupal on your site you can let your users generate great, relevant content that they can tag, share and promote to their friends, registered site users and to other social networks and tools like Facebook and Twitter.

To take advantage of the wonderful thing that is user generated content, you'll need to make it easy for potential contributors, and still manage to have some control over your brand as expressed in the content of your site. The key is to do both of these without one getting in the way of the other, insuring an easy process for content contributors and an easy experience for editors.

With Drupal you can easily restrict the right to publish and set up approval processes so that content produced by certain levels of users must be reviewed befroe publication. Additionally, it's easy to have as many levels of users as you'd like and to promote users to have rights such as approving content when you think they're ready. The more you distribute control to appropriate people the smoother the process of getting content live and the happier everyone will be.

Inherent in all of this is a focus on breaking down the boundaries to creating content. To insure that people will want to contribute to your site, it has to be as easy as possible. Use contributed and stock modules to allow users to login via their Facebook and OpenID credentials so you don't have to force users to register on your site. Encourage content creation. Have a simple WYSIWYG editor for people to use when creating content so they don't think they have to know HTML (several options are available in Drupal). And streamline the approval process as much as possible so users get the satisfaction of seeing their content come up fast, and the overall quality of content is something that will make them proud to be a part of.