Today content contributors are all over the Internet.  We tweet, blog, wiki, and Digg.  Your own personal "brand" is just as important as the content you create.  Here are some steps to improve your search engine optimization (SEO) and to use your social media channels to your advantage while you share your product knowledge.

Avoid duplicate content

If you’ve written an article in your blog and received a bunch of related and helpful comments, aggregate and put them into a wiki article.

Don’t just copy and paste a blog post to the wiki.  Use the wiki as a place to compile your blog comments or release content you no longer want to maintain. 

If you find more than one wiki article where the same additions would be applicable, create a separate article and put a link in all existing articles that apply.

Publicize your content

Creating content is only step one. Once you have posted your wiki articles it’s time to get the word out.  Here are some channels and applications for linking:

Forums

Many of you provide contributions on forums.  When you see a question regarding content you know is on the wiki, rather than copy and paste the information into the forum, link the customer to the wiki directly. The user gets the information, and has an opportunity to add their viewpoint or information to the wiki article. The article gets improved discoverability because it is linked to on another site.

Blogs

If the content in the wiki is directly related to a general subject of your blog, be sure and put a link to related articles. 

Conversely, if you have written an article in the wiki that you think would be useful to your blog readers, put a blurb in your blog about the content and link them back to the wiki article.

Twitter

Use your Twitter feed to aggregate the most critical and sought after content alerts.  If you find an article that has quick information that you know will be immediately useful, go ahead and tweet about it.  Be sure to use relevant # hash tags in your tweet and shorten your URLs with a link shortening tool like bit.ly.

More importantly look for opportunities to connect with people directly on Twitter.  If you see someone is struggling with a Microsoft product and you have provided content that can help them, tweet @ them.

Remember to use these same channels to ask others to participate in wiki content creation.  As you run into folks generating helpful content, send them to the wiki.

Identify areas of content gaps

If you find you are struggling with an issue and no one seems to have an answer online, create a stub article on the wiki.  Place stub headings in the article to outline the kind of information you need. A good example of this "gap content" is the Anti-Virus Exclusion List.

See Also

• Wiki: How to Contribute Content to TechNet Wiki
• Wiki: List of Articles for TechNet Wiki

Other Languages

• Wiki: ソーシャル メディアを利用しての Wiki の SEO 改善 (ja-JP)