How to build a
Rate and Review Website
If you want to build a Rate
& Review website you will need a program to manage the
ratings and reviews or find a host that already has the program
for you to use.
If you are looking at pageBuzz
as a possible hosting solution, you are in luck, because we
happen to have a rate and review system.
The program allows anyone to
add things to be reviewed and visitors to add comments and rate
up to 10 different elements which are averaged into a rating for
each item.
Reviews can be reviewed by the
site webmaster so there are no spam posts or scammers trying to
skew results.
The program support 2500
reviewed items with up to 250 comments each or a total of 625,000
reviews. While it is not unlimited, it is certainly a great
foundation for anyone starting their own rate and review website.
If anyone were to outgrow the
system and wanted to create their own software to run a larger
rate and review website the data is exportable so it could be
transferred to another program or website without too much
trouble.
Setting Up The Website
If you use pageBuzz, all you
need to do is sign up and add the rate and review program to one
of your pages.
Signup for a website
Add a page named
"Anything"
Add the inclusion code
for the rate and review program to the page
Set up the
configuration page, setting, colors option etc
Add the items to
review
Tell people to come
over and review the items
Advantages of Rate
& Review
User Contributed
Content
Anytime you can run a website
and have the users do all the work you should. Building pages
takes time but letting other people build the pages is easy. Not
that you should not do anything, but having the added element of
user content makes your job easier and expands your ability to
generate web content.
Dynamic Content
Having users add reviews is
about one of the best things you can do for SEO. Search engines
eat up pages that get updated daily and will send more traffic
your way because it is always current.
Site like rate and review,
classifieds, forums, blogs or other active dynamic content sites
have preference in the searches and can maintain long term
traffic and grow as time goes on. So using programs like the rate
and Review are great tools not only for your users but also to
make your site more relevent in the search indexes.
Managed Via Database
Using databases to manage
content make updating and changing pages easy. If you use static
html pages you need to modify every page to change styles or the
design of a page. By using a data delivery system you can modify
2500 pages at one time by modifying the layout common to all
pages.
If you plan to keep designs
fresh and up to date you need the ability to change lots of pages
at one time and using data driven content provides that ability.
People Like to Share
Opinions
No doubt with the popularity
of twitter, facebook and all the blogs people have shown the like
to weigh in on just about everything. So giving them a place to
do that is a sure winner as long as you can get people to it,
they will tell you what they think.
Adding more Content
Of course user content is good,
but it just wont be enough, you will need to build pages, write
great reviews and add more features to build a complete website.
Sure it is easy to have the
users do all the work, but just like a shopping website, without
more than just reviews it will not get the search traffic you
need to make money.
Of course if it is just a
public service website and you don't care about traffic or making
money then don't worry about it. But if you do, then you will
want to write articles, add pages with more information, and
pages relevant to the ratings and reviews.
By creating a balanced website
you can insure that you have full search engine coverage and you
get the traffic you need to build the ratings database.
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