Wiki is the Hawaiian word for “fast”. In the web, it means much more than that. A wiki is a website that allows social content building and easy publishing/editing among members. It often uses a WYSIWYG editor or a simplified markup language.
The first recognized wiki software is WikiWikiWeb developed by Ward Cunningham in 1994. Because of its social nature, wikis were also widely used as collaborative software in the enterprise level.
Posting to WikiSites is a good example of an offpage activity that offers the benefits of increase your website’s ranking and bringing in traffic as a referral source. These authority pages hosted on a community-edited site are a good source of backlinks often associated with high trust rankings or high PageRanks. At the same time, it allows users to tap a market with inherent interest in the subject.
One of the most popular wiki sites today is Wikipedia.org It hosts billions of pages in different languages. It’s easy to add relevant content to Wikipedia, and if it is well-written and factual, chances are it’ll stay there for a while. However, it is quiet hard to use Wikipedia as a marketing tool. Some SEOs have tried adding their links to the reference section of related products and there are often edited out within days. Some have even created wikipages specific to brands they sell. These usually stay in Wikipedia longer if they are well-known brands or companies.
If you are going to write about your own brand for Wikipedia, make sure it’s based on facts and is not written like an advertising piece.
The better way to use wiki for your business is by finding ones that are relevant to your product. For instance, if you are selling hotel rooms or tour packages, then you may want to check out WikiTravel (http://wikitravel.org) . Those who are in retail can explore ProductWiki (http://www.productwiki.com/ ). Don’t expect too much staying power in a wiki site, simply because a community is often behind it, working to keep it clean.
Explore the world of wikis today and find out how you can tell more people about your product simply by sharing information.
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