Manoj Jasra has a very thought provoking and interesting post on What will and will not matter in the future of search engine marketing. Suggest you read the article if you are into SEM, but here is a very interesting point as it relates to Communities.

Personalized Search: An interview with Bill states:

“Bill Slawski: I think that ultimately personalized
search is going to require site owners to know and understand the
interests of their targeted customers better, learn about where they
like to visit on the web, what communities they may belong to, how the
site owners can get involved in those communities, and what will
convince customers to become evangelists for a site.”

We have seen several instances of websites starting at blogs, then adding “sections” – WordPress does a great job of it. There are several companies that have just a link to their blog from their news and events section – All social media related.

So back to our question – what effect will communities have on website marketing and SEM?

1. Search engines dont currenty have access to password protected community sites. But increasing number of community owners will start to provide that access since the information contained in them may be more relevant for the person doing the search.

2. As users start to expect conversational marketing instead of the current interrupt driven marketing, we will see more use of community capabilities replacing the traditional “static” web pages.

3. User generated content from your community will have more relevance in search engine (which is somewhat scary) – look no further than wikipedia.