Whenever you do a Google search, chances are good that the search results contain a link to a Wikipedia article. This is no coincidence as Wikipedia articles generally rank very well, and having an article about your organization can boost your Google ranking and drive more traffic to your site. More importantly it can bring you credibility—both through the information provided and from the fact that your organization appears “important” enough to have such an article written about it. We’ve started writing some Wikipedia articles for one of our clients and have learned a few things along the way.
The first is that Wikipedia is essentially an open forum which means that anyone can create, edit or critique an article. Given this knowledge, we recommend that you create a Wikipedia article about your organization before someone else does. Although it can always be edited by anyone, start by creating a solid base article with a neutral view point. This will help to ensure that any future edits made by others are likely to be constructive. Also note that Wikipedia keeps a full history of all content and changes so you don’t have to worry about losing anything you’ve written, should others make edits.
What you want to avoid is a promotional or marketing tone as this can lead to readers flagging your article for deletion or for further debate over its purpose and authenticity. The purpose of Wikipedia is not to market and promote but to provide the background story about your organization. Like networking, this is an inadvertent marketing strategy where you establish credibility.
Don’t be afraid to highlight the limitations of your product or service as this will help readers better understand your company’s niche and supports a neutral view point. Generally you’ll want to include the history of your company, facts such as its size, founder and target market etc. and detailed technical information about how your products and/or services work. If you have lots of products you may want to create separate articles for them.
To really get a neutral viewpoint, we recommend having someone else write it for you. Our process has been to gather as much information as possible from our client. We provide a list of questions that we think would make for good content, and then take the answers and construct an article. While the initial stage requires a bit of effort on behalf of the client, the resulting article is sure to drive traffic and boost their profile.