When adding user-generated content to your pages, consider the following best practices to help improve search engine performance.

Place Your Cells Early

Unique content that appears closer to the top of the source of your page is treated as more important and will helprank better than content towards the bottom. When you place your cells, try to include them above content that is non-unique to the page (such as navigation and callout boxes). Note that the source order is not necessarily the same as the display order -- you can use CSS floats and repositioning to make the content appear in the page where you want it. One exception to this rule is if you have a standard, consistant layout for your site design. In many cases, it is better to locate your content in the same place on every page of your site -- modern search engines will "learn" where your content is located.

Link Your User-Generated Pages

If a user adds a page and puts a ton of content on it, you'll want search engines to find that content. Be sure to include navigation to your user-generated pages. If you retrieve your content with the CellService.getCellWithChildren call, you will automatically have links to every user-generated page. If you choose a different call, be sure to call CellService.getNavigation to create a navigation component elsewhere on your page or site. When you do link to a user-generated page, be sure to use the cell's display name (available via the navigation API) as the link text. This ensures that every link to that page will use the same terms.

Give Them Breadcrumbs

As your user-generated pages gain SEO credibility, they will become destinations themselves. Provide links back to the rest of your site from these pages.

Load Your META Keywords List With User-Generated Tags

Every cell has a list of user-generated tags that your users have indicated relate to the content. Make these available to search engines. Place these tags into your META Keywords list by retrieving them via the TagService.getTags call. As for your META Description, if you cannot place unique content, you have two options: either place content based on your own category (that is, all "cajun cooking" pages get the same description) or do not place any description at all. Modern search engines are quite good at interpreting a valid page description.

Templates Should Encourage New Content

If you implement templates on your site, be sure that they encourage users to add new content. Templates that already contain a lot of information are less likely to be edited -- which increases the amount of duplicative content on your site. Search engines will reduce the score of sites with a lot of duplicative content.

Optimize Your URL Patterns

If you are adding user-generated pages to your site, you control how your URL is structured. While constructing your URL, try to follow as many of these practices as possible:

• Avoid using querystring values to contain the cell data. That is, avoid "?cellId=[cellId]" in favor of directory-patterns to identify values.
• Include your own category structure in the URI. This allows search engines to "cluster" your data in related groups. For example, use "http://yourdomain.com/cajun-cooking/[cellId]".
• Avoid %20, plusses, or underscores. Hyphens work best at splitting words.
• Place the unique information earlier. If you include the display name as well as the cell ID, place the cell ID before the display name.
• Wherever possible, use lowercase letters in your URLs.

As an example, a URL that appears like: http://yourdomain.com/cajun-cooking/chicken-recipes-132/easy-recipes is preferable to one that appears like: http://yourdomain.com/usergen?name=Easy%20Recipes&cellId=chicken-recipes-132.

Encourage Useful Display Names

Every cell in your namespace has a human-readable display name. These display names are maintained by your moderators (with the rename command) and can appear in your navigation and elsewhere. If there are search terms that you are targeting, ensure they appear in your display names.

Give Your Cells Meaningful Identifiers

Unless your user-generated pages are given IDs automatically, you are in charge of what the unique IDs are for each cell. An ID of "5014" may be unique and meaningful in your system, but if you prepend it with "recipes," you'll garner SEO benefits for that term. As stated in the URL practice, use a hyphen to separate words or as the delimiter between your ID and the term.

Put Your Display Names In Headers

If you're creating a shell page to contain user-generated content, place the cell's display name in an <H1> tag. Note that WYSIWYG content provides two levels of header options for your users, <H2> and <H3>; which allows you to programmatically set the highest-order header.