Search Engine Optimization and Ning -- Not Really 

Posted By Wesley Picotte on 06/03/2009

Corporate marketers are on to the non-secret—social communities can be a very good thing for your brand. Organizing one around a brand name or product can provide a taproot of drooling evangelists who are active online. And, as if drooling evangelism isn’t enough to justify an investment into building a social community, another benefit of doing so is search engine optimization. Community features such as blogs and forums are like search engine fly strips—impossible to ignore and very, very sticky.

So, good. Build a community. Generate content. Gain an adoring, active Internet audience. And, without trying too hard, create a new source of qualified organic search traffic. Time for a promotion!

Well, not quite—at least, not when using Ning out of the box. White Horse experimented with Ning, which allows anyone to create their own social network for a particular topic or need, and found that while its feature set is robust, the blog application does not provide for the control or customization of metadata and other elements that are crucial to effective search engine optimization.

At White Horse, organic search performance was at least one of the main objectives for creating a Ning community. Within the community, the blog was the main opportunity for building content and so it was through this lens that I assessed Ning. My discoveries and observations focused on four elements present in each post we created using Ning's blog platform:

1. Blog Post Titles (headlines)
2. Blog Post Body Copy
3. Blog tags
4. Links to the WH domain

Blog Post Titles (headlines)
When you publish a blog post on Ning, the application borrows the headline you've written and inserts it into three HTML elements that are essential to search engine optimization (SEO)—the Title and H1 tags and the page’s URL. Search engines rely heavily on these elements to determine a blog’s relevance to specific search terms—they are integral to organic search performance.

While this method borrows from practices established by pure blog platforms like WordPress or Movable Type, there's a key difference with Ning. WordPress and Movable Type allow for the use of add-ons (some free and others for cost) that provide administrators finite control over a range of blog aspects, including look and feel, functionality and features, and elements like metadata that affect SEO. The Ning platform does not offer this flexibility, however; regarding SEO, it does not provide the ability to control metadata elements and even if you’re a PHP whiz (PHP is the open source programming language that drives WordPress, Moveable Type, and Ning), modifying the application's code to programmatically manage metadata is prohibited. Ouch, Ning! This is so very un-Web 2.0 of you.

This doesn't disqualify Ning out of hand as a viable way to build organic search traffic, but it does make it difficult. With Ning replicating your headlines across multiple HTML elements, the positive or negative effect that the headline's content has on organic search performance is magnified. Thus, it's absolutely essential to adhere to focused keyword usage guidelines when writing them. Put it this way—if targeted keywords do not appear consistently within these HTML elements, you will not gain SEO traction. So write your headlines very carefully.

Blog Tags
Ning does double duty with the descriptive tags—short descriptions that allow you and your readers to organize posts—by inserting them into the HTML Keyword tag, another important SEO element. This practice has a profound impact on the SEO-ishness of your blog. As with headlines, the gains and losses to organic search performance resulting from your use of tags is amplified by the way Ning's application pirates this content, meaning that anything but very strategic use of Ning tags will have a deleterious effect on organic search performance.

I saw this first hand, as the White Horse team began contributing posts during our Ning test. White Horse offers services like digital advertising, emerging media, persona-led Web design, and technical engineering. Ideally, our blog topics focus on these areas and as a result, our Ning tags are aligned with our service terms, resulting in well-constructed HTML Keyword tags.

However, descriptive tags like "iPod," "Susan Boyle,” and "My Dog" made appearances. Somehow, the creative minds here at White Horse found ways to relate our pedestrian practice areas to interesting blog subjects. And, following their nascent blogger instincts, we quickly amassed a long list of untargeted descriptive tags, along with a useless list of meta-keywords that hung like little SEO landmines within our blog's HTML. Not good! Deadly, in fact, to our business objectives.

So back to the problem with Ning…as with headlines, its application provides no options for customizing meta-keywords. What's more, while the administrator for your Ning community can add tags to any post, existing tags cannot be edited. Therefore, the approach to creating descriptive tags in Ning needs to be carefully thought through. To be fair, this is true with any blog platform. But without the finite control available with other blog solutions, you need to adhere to a disciplined tag nomenclature to avoid diluting the value of the HTML Keyword tag.

Blog Post Body Copy
Yet another Ning no-no I discovered concerns the HTML Description tag, the content of which is used by search engines to populate organic search results. It's also as another key associative element engines use to determine relevance between your blog and search terms. As with headlines and descriptive tags, there's no way within the Ning application to customize the HTML Description tag—the application automatically hijacks your otherwise innocent introductory paragraph.

Meaning, once again, that the principles applying to headlines and descriptive tags also apply to your blog content—and specifically your introductory paragraph. Your mantra when writing this should be "use primary keywords liberally.” This is always important when organic search performance is a goal, but given Ning's double duty on this content, it's essential.

Links to a Parent Domain:
In any scenario, the presence of multiple internal site links laden with SEO terms will do a lot of heavy site optimization lifting. BUT…if your hope is that your Ning-hosted blog content will elevate the search rank of an external corporate site, it won’t—at least, not by virtue of being created. This is true even if you mask the URL to appear as though it is part of your organization's parent domain, as we did with ours, ensuring that our URL appeared to visitors as "whitehorse.ning.com".

As far as search engines are concerned, if you do a good job creating subject-specific content—meaning that you write it while adhering to a smart keyword strategy—you'll lay the cornerstones for organic search performance. No matter how closely related that content is to your business, products or services, though, Ning is indexed by search engines as Ning.

This is a major quandary if organic search performance is one of your goals. In this scenario, an inability to associate keyword-rich content to the domain upon which your shingle is hung can hardly justify the time investment required to create the content in the first place. There is a work-around, which is to cross-link from the blog to the Web site as frequently as possible. In-bound links from credible sources that rank well for your search terms are a major component to successful SEO. Your Ning blog can certainly serve as one of those sources, but bear in mind that a successful linking strategy requires many such sources. This is true irrespective of where your blog is hosted. The key difference with Ning, though, is that the organic search performance boost resulting from hosting ever-changing, keyword-dense content on your main domain is not possible.

Conclusion
Ning is built to facilitate the creation of social communities and offers a fully baked set of features for accomplishing this. However, with the double- and triple-duty that Ning does on blog content, you need to develop a refined set of keyword usage guidelines if your goal is to gain organic search traffic. In my opinion, if this is your goal then Ning is not a good solution. Look to others provided by the aforementioned WordPress or Six Apart, or to those now baked into mid-market and enterprise content management systems.

Tags: organic search, social networks, blogs