Search engine optimization is crucial to get traffic to your membership site. You likely already know this because it’s difficult to avoid. Everyone and their brother has an idea about how to best go about getting your membership site listed high on the search engines. The truth is actually much simpler. The truth is that content always has been and is still the key to search engine optimization.

Good content is the best way to keep the search engines happy

What type of content must you have? The best, of course!

Okay, here’s what you really need:

Articles

Product reviews

How-to guides

Reports

Seminars / Training courses

Discussion Forums

Blogs

Use unique content everywhere, or at least everywhere that you can.

The duplicate content issues have gotten a little bit out of hand and overall you can still use reprint articles and PLR content as a good way to get traffic to your site. However, try to include your own unique content as well. To be classed as unique, your webpage text needs to be at least 30% different to any other webpage on the internet.

Similarly, if you use PLR (Private Label Rights) material, alter this to make it unique content. Although less people will have access to this material, many of them will use the material as it is without making any changes. You’ll definitely want to change the Title Tag and perhaps the first few sentences of the article.

Ideally you want to create content for your membership site from scratch, to make it targeted and relevant to your audience. If you do not want to produce the content yourself, hire a ghostwriter.

Add new content constantly!

To maintain a high page rank with the search engines, webmasters need to regularly add new content to their websites.

This won’t be an issue for membership site owners, who will have to add new content frequently just to ensure their members continue to pay their subscription.

A blog is a great way to add content to your site on a regular basis. Post something on your blog at least once a week, but more often if possible. Encouraging your members to comment on your blog may give you ideas for follow up blog posts, and will also increase your search engine ranking as you will see below.

Encourage, entice, and even bribe your members to submit content.

Having other people submit content for your site will help to increase your traffic flow. Get your members to add content to your site in the following ways:

1. Discussion forums

Encourage them to post on discussion forums. You will need software that allows forum posts to be picked up by search engines to make this effective.

2. Blog comments

Allow them to add comments to your blog. Preventing blog spam may require specific software and give your members a code to enable them to post comments.

3. Product reviews

You could ask members to review your products after they purchase. Of course you need to make sure you have quality products to avoid negative reviews.

4. Articles and ideas

Ask your members to submit relevant articles and ideas to you site. Always give them credit for any material you use. Perhaps you could run a members’ contest and give a suitable prize or monetary reward each month for the best article or tip submitted.