Employing user roles to get your team involved

The first feature is User Roles. User Roles are simply the system by which you can approve new users and set their administrative level. Higher administrative levels mean that the users have more authority and power on the site. Here is a summary of the available User Roles in WordPress:

With User Roles, you can easily and safely open your website up to all the members of your organization. More writers mean more content. Collaborative websites grow larger and quicker with more interesting content.

Improving ranking with user comments

Here's where WordPress really starts to leave static websites in the dust: the commenting system. WordPress' commenting system is simply a feature that let's any visitor to your website leave comments (good or bad) about your Pages and Posts. You get the final say on whether a comment gets approved or deleted, and you can turn commenting on or off for individual Posts/Pages.

The commenting system brings your website's visitors into the dialog. You can learn a lot from the comments that users leave on your website. Some customers might point out a design flaw in one of your products, or pose a question that benefits all your visitors.

Page/Post comments are great for SEO; your users are now generating content for you. When your users comment on a page they create new content with almost no intervention from you, except to click on the Approve button in the WordPress dashboard.

When the search engines visit your site, they'll find the new comments and index your new content—the search engines have no idea if you wrote it or not, and they wouldn't care anyway. When a search engine discovers periodic fresh content on your website, your site now gets treated differently. As a site with regular new content, you get more visits from search spiders, faster indexing, and higher ranking.

An extreme example of faster indexing through the creation of fresh content is Craigslist. Craigslist is the ultimate content site: millions of new, original pages are created each week. Google knows that Craigslist is constantly updated by its users, so they send multiple search spiders to Craigslist to constantly index this flood of new content. That's why while ordinary websites might wait 12 days for a new page to be indexed by Google, a new page on Craigslist might show up in the Google index in 15 minutes.

Commenting is a powerful device that you should keep implemented on all your Posts. Commenting on Pages doesn't always work as well, because Pages have a different character (your Home page, your Contact Us page—sometimes commenting on such pages isn't a fit). If you do turn commenting on, be prepared to moderate some spam comments.

WordPress' commenting system at work makes good pages into great pages. A popular blog post that offered a WordPress tutorial generated user comments, with suggestions for additions to the list. We periodically add suggestions from the comments to the Post itself. It's a win-win scenario; the Post gets free content from our visitors, and the visitors feel engaged and empowered. Let's have a look at the following screenshot:

Using update services

The final element that WordPress contributes to your SEO efforts is the Update Services. Update Services are tools you can use to let other people know you've updated your website. WordPress automatically notifies popular Update Services that you have published new content on your site by sending an XML-RPC ping each time you create or update a Page or Post. Then, the Update Services process your ping and index your new content. Users on sites like Technorati or Weblogs can discover your new content. This means more traffic for your site.

WordPress is set up by default to ping only Ping-O-Matic's server at http://rpc.pingomatic.com/, but you can manually add other ping services by navigating in your dashboard to Settings and then Writing, and enter ping services in the field labeled Update Services.