Jamdo Marketing Blog

If you are not familiar with WikiPedia, then it’s probably something you should explore a little as it can be very useful to your blogging in several ways.

Wikipedia is just a big online encylopedia that anyone can alter and edit. That means it has a massive amount of content and it most probably even has a lot of content on your niche. The search engines also love Wikipedia and certainly people do too.

This presents bloggers with an opportunity.

If you are an expert in your niche (and after a few weeks of writing, you are likely to at least know more than 95% of the population about that topic) then there are many things you can do in conjunction with Wikipedia that will benefit both your blog and the quality of information in your niche. Unfortunately the quality of information on Wikipedia is not always excellent (I have written about this and the pending evolution of Web 3.0 before), but again, this is something that should be seen as an opportunity rather than a problem.

So what are these potential benefits that Wikipedia gives the blogger that I am talking about?

Ideas

If you are struggling to come up with ideas, then Wikipedia can be a great resource. I am not so much talking about what Wikipedia says as what it doesn’t say that presents an opportunity for you. If you are familiar with a particular topic, then head over to Wikipedia and see what it says about that topic. If you think that the entry is lacking, then write a blog about what is missing.

Also look at what other pages the entry is linking to (within Wikipedia). These other pages may have missing information that will give you an idea for a blog post. Get to it and write! In fact, I have found a lot fo entries in Wikipedia that are very much underdone. In fact, the only topics that seem to be at all comprehensive are the ones about technology and the internet. Most other topics have heaps of room for improvement.

By simply seeing what is left out of Wikipedia, you will get ideas for your own writing. Moreover, most of the ideas that you get will fall under the banner of evergreen content which means you will be writing reference material that will be useful for longer than a week or two.

Also don’t forget to check out the list of links at the bottom of the relevant entries. They will usually introduce you to a stack of useful sites in your area. You will be able to add the conversations that they have started and contact other web masters in your niche.

Links

As I mentioned, the search engines love Wikipedia and you will also notice that a lot of their internal pages have very solid Google PR.  You will also remember that anyone is allowed to edit the pages. You therefore have an opportunity to get a one way link from a highly relevant page with good PR to your new relevant, well written and well researched blog post. I have put that in bold italics because it is imperative that you add something worthwhile to the pool of information.

Irrelevant links to highly commercialised web pages will be deleted by the community very quickly. In fact, you may even have your link deleted if you have adsense on your page though I have never had a link deleted (though I have always linked only to quality content).

Now, I certainly do NOT recommend spamming Wikipedia with a bunch of new links in a short period of time, nor linking to content that doesn’t add any information to the subject. You will get a bad reputation on Wikipedia and they are very good at seeing who is altering which pages on the site.

External Links

As you know, the search engine algorythms take into account the links on your blog to other pages. If you want to put links in your own posts, then the relevant page of Wikipedia is a good one to consider. Linking out to reputable sites with relevant content will give a nice little boost to your own blog’s SEO.

Concluding Thoughts

Wikipedia is a useful tool in your arsenal. I certainly don’t recommend spamming it with links or interfering with your competitor’s links as some others do, but if you use it in a constructive manner, then you can get a win-win scenario.

Technorati Tags: wikipedia, blogging, web 2.0, web 3.0, linking, seo

Share This