Search Engine Optimization Tips Blog

SEO for your forum can pose a great challenge. We cannot ignore the SEO for our forum hoping that just by installing the forum script we can get the required traffic, ranking and clicks automatically. If you want to maximize the potential of your forum, then it is important that you optimize your forum too as you would optimize your website. There are some special points to note when it comes to forum optimization.

The nature of the forums are such that there is lot of room for duplicate content. We will have a number of links which have different linking text but the linking pages will be the same. For example, link text such as quotes, reply etc will lead to the same page. This can confuse the search engine bots. When search engine bots enter the same page through different links, it will consider that you have the same content in multiple pages. This can put you through duplicate content issues.

Make sure that you also use Robot.txt effectively to avoid search engine bots from reading unnecessary pages. When search engines find excessive content that are not related to your forum or your site, it will not be able to judge properly the essence of your website. This will affect the effectiveness of the keywords by diluting the keyword rich forum text with other content that are not relevant to the discussion or the site’s content. Pages such as user profiles, membership details etc., should be blocked from the search engines.

You can customize your script to incorporate meta tags including title tag as well as meta description tag. You can allow a certain number of characters in your post as meta description and write posts bearing in mind the head tag customization.
Though search engine bots can easily crawl tables, it may help to get rid of some of the tables so that the file size reduces with unwanted site architecture.

Also try to keep your header clean do not allow your CSS to eat up hundreds of lines. This will help the search engine bots to access the text easily and index the important content quickly rather than plough through hundreds of lines that are no way helpful on SEO counts.

Since your forum will be regularly updated, it should be frequently visited by the search engine bots. So get your sitemap ready as this is the only way to get search engines visit you frequently. Google has its own XML Sitemap; make use of this feature and get your site frequently crawled. Do not ignore pages with old discussion threads. Provide easy access to these pages. As long as these discussions are something to do with your site, they are useful.

You know you are supposed to get links from sites with a high reputation as they are considered ‘authority’. How do you decide this? Is it solely based on PageRank?

Finding websites with authority is major consideration when you start planning your linking campaign. There are many ways to measure domain authority; the quality and quantity of the links, PageRank, domain rankings and relevancy of domain keywords.

If an older domain which has 1000 links from other trusted sites links to you, it is worth more than a site with 10,000 junk links or from a site with 10 links. You have to balance the quality and quantity. Paid directories, where you can buy links for PageRank and Google allows it are a dying practice.  Paid for links are on the whole not allowed.

PageRank can help you if it is coming in from another site, but remember there appears to be a several month lag between real time stats and the visible toolbar! Other factors may have a greater impact. If a site already ranking for some of the keywords you are targeting links to you, that is a plus. If they are already ranking for that term and find you worthy of a link, Google pays attention.

Some sites do rank for keywords which don’t appear prominently on their site, sites with a domains similar to yourscan help you by linking to you. Keywords and anchor text help improve the quality of links. Be the kind of site other webmasters find valuable, and they will like to link to you.

If your links are coming from .gov and .edu sites that have relevancy to your topic, then you are linking well. Links from quality websites to you (when the linking page itself has good authority) can give you some authority.

The url significance can also have an effect. You don’t want to be linked to from a session ID or randomly generated url.  .PDF or .doc extensions can affect weight quality – if the doc itself has numerous inbound links giving it authority of its own.

A static page with links to it being added over a long period of time is valuable as it is not outdated. A news site which is updated daily may also be a high quality link since they are being kept up to date. It depends on the type of site.

Authority sites meet the above criteria. The more high quality links you have, the more your site becomes an authority in its own right and the closer you are to the top of the pile.

 Optimizing your title tags for maximum search engine visibility and user friendliness is equally important. Search engine use title tags to gather information about the website, and also to help determine relevance. Many engines will use them as the headers on the SERPs. Users look at title tags to see what page of your website they are on, so they need to make sense to your visitors as well.  

You have to pay attention when matching your title tag to your webpage. Finish your webpage before finalizing the title tag. Then make sure your title tag is appropriate, and that it can be recognized accurately by the search engines. Title tags allow you to specifically denote each page, so don’t waste the extra space by merely making them all simply refer back to the whole website!

 Your content must be carefully optimized with keywords which can be found through solid research. The title tags need to mirror these keywords, and you should ensure  you have consistency between the webpage content and the title tag. Thsi will give you proper ranking on the SERPs. The primary keyword is placed near to the beginning of the title tag, and the entire tag is descriptive, so anyone seeing it will instantly have a clear, accurate idea of what the page is about.

 Use the same primary keyword in the url. The more consistent you are, the more you help the search engines determine the value of your content. Never think to game the engine by stuffing your content, url or title tags with keywords, as this can hurt your rankings. Just utilize keywords properly to accurately describe your web content, and you will have both excellent results and good click through rates! 

Never use black hat methods to try and trick search engines. Using keywords in your title tag that do not appear in your actual webpage content can damage their trust in you! Your title tag should always correspond with the actual webpage content. This will show the engines you are a trustworthy siote, and you will also eb appreciated by users and get maximum click through rates. if you use descriptive words in the title tag, you can even improve customer click through when the rankings in the SERPS are still low.

Get as much information across as you can in your title tag. Users who keep several webpages open in different browser windows can rapidly note title tags to see which page they are on, bookmark your site by the specific page, and recognize it later even if they don’t customize it.

Your title tag should be 65 characters or less. Longer ones run the risk of being truncated by the search engines. Use title caps for a professional look. If you follow through with these tips on all of your title tags, your click through rate and your rankings for each webpage should improve over time.

Content is the most important aspect of your website. You should know how you can benefit from your website’s content the most. If you do not pay attention to some of these basic factors, you will not be able to get the maximum out of your website’s content.

1.    The first important factor that you should remember about your website’s content is that it should be Unique, that means that it should not be content scraped from other websites. If you copy and paste text from other websites, you will have duplicate content issues with the search engines. You will unnecessarily be subjecting your website to risk of penalty.
2.    The second factor to be considered is keeping your content fresh. You need to constantly update your website’s content. You cannot have pages remaining without any updates for years and expect to get good search engine ranking. You should update your website regularly.
3.    Proper formatting of content to enhance the effectiveness of keywords. Use heading tags for your content and in the headings use all the main keywords. Use other formatting features such as underlining, bolding, italicizing the text that is important. In this case, the important text is the keywords.
4.    If you have lot of text in a particular page, try to split it up so that you can get the maximum benefit. Search engines do not normally crawl to the last page of your website. So if you have lengthy content in the same page, search engines may not crawl the entire page.
5.    Try to avoid Content Separation in your pages using IP or browser types. This can affect your website’s ranking. This will confuse the search engine bots. It is best to have different pages in case the nature of your website demands you to serve different content based on the IP. When you use different pages, the URL will be different so there is no room for confusion.
6.    Never use invisible text in your web pages hoping to increase your keyword density. You can easily get the desired keyword density using visible text and you do not have to necessarily use all such black hat tactics to get the search engine’s attention. You will get the search engine’s attention but it will be negative attention, which is not desirable.
7.    Make sure that your website has the desired keyword density. This does not mean that you have to stuff your website content with keywords. Keyword stuffing will elicit search engine penalty.
These are some of the factors that you need to take in to consideration. There are many other factors that make or break your website content. But the one’s listed above are the most crucial ones.

If you have to take a poll asking which is the most popular social networking sites today, you will get unanimous response, “Twitter”. Twitter has gained sudden popularity among various groups of internet enthusiasts. Because of its popularity as the top social networking site and the amount of traffic it attracts, it has become one of the top sites for SEO link building and traffic generation.

Unlike the many other social networking sites, Twitter has stringent set of guidelines and rules.
You can use twitter to promote your brand however, you need to first understand how twitter works. Once you gain steady foot with twitter then you can work wonders with twitter.

You must learn to keep to few ground rules while using twitter. Rule number 1, which is to be considered as cardinal rule is don’t spam. If you spam the place, that is what you will get back. So avoid spamming rather be more sophisticated in promoting your brand. Once your updates are useful and interesting you will find good number of followers to visit your tweets. You need to be more sophisticated in building your brand rather than being a moron who tries to sell his or her links.

Do not wait for others to follow you search for topics that are of your interest and follow them. It will help you get some valuable information and at the same time you will be able to get into a larger group that is interested in a particular field. When you follow people you will increase the likelihood of people whom you are following visit your tweets and in turn follow you. This will increase the number of followers. The best thing that can happen in twitter is to have a large number of followers. When you have a large number of followers you can easily promote your brand and your website address.
Remember that twitter is basically not an advertising platform, it is rather a platform for debates so you must look for relevant debates and make an entry. You will find a lot of discussions going on in twitter on any given field of your choice. The more you get involved in conversations, the better. You need to get the attention of people and that is the only way your brand can get their attention. So you need to be as active as possible in twitter. The best thing about Twitter is that you can just post short messages so you learn to be as concise as possible with your posts and branding efforts. Twitter does not restrict you from having multiple accounts as long as your login is different. Rather than tweeting about various thing from the same Twitter account, use different accounts for different areas of your business.

 Subscribe in a reader

• Email Subscription by Feedburner