Building Content
Public Domain Content
Public domain content is more plentiful than people think. The government puts out publications on everything from geographic data on all the countries in the world to consumer safety information, all of which you can freely use. If you're looking for public domain health information check out the CDC, FDA, or NIH. If you're looking for food and nutrition information try the USDA. If you're looking for data on foreign countries you could check the CIA or State Department. Once you get out there and look you will be amazed at how easy it is to find government produced content, much of it may be available online so you don't even need to type it all in. However offline sources should not be discounted.
As already has been mentioned you can often find public domain jokes and other small informational tidbits floating around the Internet, additionally any work published previous to 1923 is in the public domain. Public domain works aren't limited to literature either, but paintings, musical scores, and non-fiction reference works on topics ranging from history, to science, to biographies.
User Created Content
Obviously if you run a community site then you have mostly user created content, but how do you get such content for other types of sites? Simple, you ask for it. If you have a quick tips section of your site you can provide a form for user's to submit their own tips, and this is true for any section of your site. If you ask for user submissions you will usually get them.
One aspect many sites over look is publishing user feedback. If you run a community in addition to your reference or online magazine site that's great but all that content created by your community isn't really doing much other than taking up space, you need to make that type of content accessible on your main site. The solution is to allow users to post comments or information directly on the page where you have your article or other content. This way the user's posts will be indexed by search engines along with your article, the reason this is good is because a user may post about a related topic not covered in your article and by having that post included with the article when someone searches for that related topic your article may come up. In many cases all you need is for a word to appear on a page once and that page can show up in the search engines under that word, so getting more content on a single page through user feedback can be highly beneficial, and no it's not going to hurt the ranking of your article by lowering any keyword density value.
Also if you do run a community site you need to make sure as much of your forum as possible is being spidered by the search engines. Because of how they are coded, many forums will not be spidered by search engines. If a search engine cannot read your 40,000 or however many posts then they aren't doing a thing to help bring new traffic into your site. In a later chapter I will discuss how to detect a search engine spider on your site, but if you notice that most of your forum is not indexed you should look for a solution within the support community of your forum software for making your forum spider friendly.
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