Boost Your Site’s Performance with Q&As

Generate leads by answering visitors' questions

If you’ve already optimized the obvious—and easy—areas of your website to improve its visibility, your next step might be to try to boost your site with Q&As (Questions and Answers), either by answering questions on Q&A sites, or by creating a Q&A page on your own site. These Q&As are of particular value to law firms and those seeking legal advice, due to the number of questions the average person has about matters of law.

As reported by Pavel Israelsky in his SEOmoz post entitled “6 Reasons Why Q&A Sites Can Boost Your SEO in 2011 (Despite Google’s Farmer Update)“, Q&A sites’ popularity has been growing as people get more comfortable with using online social interaction to gather information. They also rank well in search results. Some less-authoritative sites were felled by Google’s Farmer update, but the stronger sites are still doing well.

You can use Q&As two ways:
• Answer questions on already established sites
• Start your own Q&A site or section of your current site

Answer questions
The simplest way to start is to find open questions related to your area of expertise as showcased on your website, and answer them. Most Q&A sites allow you to put links either within the text or in a sources section. Link back to appropriate pages on your website or blog to boost your inbound links. Two popular Q&A sites are Quora and Askville (operated by Amazon).

Start with questions related to your main keywords – the phrases you are targeting on your website (Read more about keyword selection here). Once you have a good link profile for these, move on to secondary keywords. Do this slowly to avoid Google becoming suspicious of a sudden influx of links.

Most Q&A sites’ links are nofollow and don’t help PageRank. But Google still sees them, and they still drive highly targeted traffic to your site.

Set up your own Q&A pages
Create a subdirectory on your website for your Q&A pages, and post some relevant questions for people to answer. To gain better authority and visibility, keep your Q&A pages tightly focused on your niche. If you want to branch out, create a new site.

Your Q&A section can boost your entire site’s credibility as more people visit to ask and answer questions.

Information and data contained in this post gathered in association with Chicago Brain Injury Lawyers at Phillips Law Offices.