Today I read that AOL purchased a company called Yedda, a company that runs a business model similar to what Yahoo is doing over at Yahoo! Answers. The idea is to build a community where questions are asked and answers are given, and in the end you get a massive amount of content written for free, in natural language and it has a good chance of ranking in other search engines. It’s worked great for Yahoo! Answers and it now looks like AOL has decided to tap into the power of users to get quality content.

Bravo AOL. [Never thought I would get an opportunity to type that :) ]

As an affiliate it might be a bit ambitious to think you could compete with these large Q&A services in a broad sense. With that said, there is a lot to learn from the Q&A concept.

If you want an example of someone who has been leveraging this concept for years, look no further than Dave Taylor. You may have never heard of his site, AskDaveTaylor.com, but that’s ok…the search engines certainly have, and Dave makes a pretty good income from getting search engine traffic from pages containing user generated content.

Ranking an affiliate site #1 for “auto insurance” is a lot less likely than ranking for “how do I find Colorado auto insurance?”. Ranking well for common questions might be the answer to your SEO success.

I’ll leave it at that…did deeper if you’d like.