Using Bad Word Filters to Boost SEO & Productivity

If you’re a webmaster, administrator, or moderator of any large blog, forum, or other community site, you’ll find that a lot of time is wasted spelling out URIs to various useful links, whether they’re to guides, reviews, downloads, or forms. On a big website with lots of members (especially that kind that don’t use the search feature), you’ll find that dozens of hours or more are wasted looking up and writing these URIs for your readers/members to follow.

Compare [url=http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Windows+XP]Windows XP dual-boot guide[/url] to XP dboot — it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out which is easier, quicker, and simpler to use. But of course, your readers have no idea what “dboot guide” is or where they can find it – that’s where the “bad word filters” come in.

Most forums, blogs, wikis, and just about any other “web platform engines” have a plugin, module, or admin center feature to enable the filtering of swear words and their ilk. Simply create a new entry that replaces a quick and easy-to-remember “keyword” with a fully-formatted link of your choice. You can replace “qwerty” with “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” or (much more usefully) replace things like “gsearch ” with “http://www.google.com/search?q=” which lets you type things like “gsearch EasyBCD” and have them automagically replaced with the appropriate link.

You can use this to boost productivity (by speeding up the process of finding, posting, and formatting links) and to increase SEO (by converting keywords to internal links to the respective pages). For instance, replacing all instances of “NeoSmart Technologies” with NeoSmart Technologies:

<a href="http://neosmart.net/" title="NeoSmart Technologies" style="color: red; font-weight: bold" rel="follow">NeoSmart Technologies</a>

Best of all, some web scripts preserve the original text and reformat it on the fly (verses permanently changing the text to the replacement), so that if the URI should ever change (and it shouldn’t, ever), the text also auto-magically changes with it. For instance, if your homepage moved from neosmart.net to neosmart.com, all you’d have to do is open that bad-word filter entry and change it to point to neosmart.com instead, and all “shortcut keywords” you ever entered will also be relpaced… Talk about efficient!

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