UGC Encourages Linking
One of the big powers of user-generated content is that it inspires people to contribute and then link to their contributions. We’ve seen this with YOUmoz, and on several client sites – bloggers and forum contributors and website owners feel the need to link to the posts/comments/pages they’ve written from their own sites.
You can take advantage of this pattern by encouraging and rewarding quality UGC – the better the submission, the more prominence you can give it. A thumbs or rating system can help, and a ranking system appears to be the ultimate. Contests and prizes (particularly non-monetary ones) work terrifically well, i.e. “the contributer with the most traffic to his/her page wins an iPod” – and everybody starts linking to their posts from wherever they can 
