It is possible to use the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia as part of your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. These practices don’t involve any monetary expense, although some investment of time is necessary. Using Wikipedia for SEO is somewhat like marketing a website on message boards, you ought to avoid obvious self-promotion, while offering information of benefit to other people at the same time.

Anyone can contribute encyclopedia articles on general or specific subjects to Wikipedia. Registration isn’t even required to edit articles, but the IP address and time/date of non-registered users who edit them is recorded and available for public viewing. Becoming a registered user of Wikipedia only requires a username and password, with no personal information necessary. It also allows you to create new articles and is likely to somewhat reduce the scrutiny applied to your practices.

Most encyclopedia articles on Wikipedia have lists of “External Links”, which are links to related websites/pages outside of Wikipedia, and lists of “Notes”, which are references used for the article, often including links to other websites. Links within the article are usually to other pages within Wikipedia. Creating or editing articles so that they have “External Links” or “Notes” pointing to your website can be helpful in your SEO practices, as many search engines (including Google) will give the site a better search ranking if there are more links to it on other websites.

The “External Links” section of the Wikipedia pages is more beneficial for SEO because each link has a title, whereas links in the “Notes” section are only linked to by a number in brackets. Links with a relevant, descriptive title are more likely to benefit your SEO practices. Consider adding links to other useful, relevant websites so that it doesn’t become obvious you are trying to improve the SEO status of a particular site.

However, your SEO practices are more likely to achieve long-term success if you do more than just place links to related pages on a website at the end of already-created encyclopedia articles. Other Wikipedia users are more likely to appreciate (or at least not disapprove of) your actions if you utilize a mix of adding information with your website legitimately linked (in “Notes”) as a source, creating new articles with useful information and your website in the “External Links”, and improving other articles without adding any links to them. When entering new articles related to the website’s subject, provide thorough information which is backed by various sources.

Adhering to the above-mentioned SEO practices should help make it possible to effectively optimize a website through the use of Wikipedia, without harming the credibility of Wikipedia or your site.