We have mostly discussed the basics, getting a domain name, choosing a hosting company, and getting your website built. If you are just going to have a static website, then you may not need this chapter, but there are some benefits to the different things you can add to your website.

Here is a short list of website addons and the benefit you might get from them;

1. Guestbook. This is one of the oldest website addons and most people do not use them anymore. It is where visitors to your website can sign your guestbook and leave a link back to their website. (Not recommended by us at all. Constant management required and spammers love guestbooks.)

2. Article Dashboard Directory A lot of people will tell you that unless you are in the article marketing or article directory business that you don’t need an article directory.

However, I have a website that got crawled by google 100,000 times last month because I have one. It also increases my search engine saturation, (number of pages indexed by the search engines), daily. Right now that website is a 30,000 page website.

An article directory is good for SEO. It takes a little time to manage because you have to approve articles and put them into the right categories. Article dashboard is the best software to install. It’s easy to manage and free.

3. A Company Blog Installing a company blog like www.yourcompanyname.com/blog and posting to it daily allows you to easily add fresh daily content to your website.

It can also bring in new traffic for your website. A lot of people are less intimidated by your blog than your website. You can publish your press releases, announcements, and special offers as well. WordPress is the best software to install if you plan to add a blog to your website.

Professional Management for Business Blogs

4. A Forum or Message Board Owning a forum sounds a lot easier than it is. The best software for a forum is either PHPbb or vBulletin in my opinion.

But keep in mind that “Build it and they will come” is from a baseball movie and does not apply to websites, blogs and forums. You have to advertise your forum. You have to keep the spammers out of your forum. You have to add content to your forum daily so people will have something to read and comment on. You have to respond to people posting in your forum.

Forum management is almost a full time job from the very beginning, so if you are planning to install a forum, make sure you are ready to devote time to it or hire a professional forum manager to help you.

5. Hit Counters & Stats Counters Another old tool to ignore. People do not believe you when you tell them a million visitors have been to your website today no matter what your little hit counter says. If you need to track stats, use google analytics or web trends.

6. Speaking Characters Use these to really annoy everyone who visits your website. I’m kidding . . . well a little. There are proper uses for certain websites for installing talking characters. However, if the reason you are thinking of installing a talking character is because you think it’s “really cool”, then don’t do it.

If the character has an actual purpose of explaining something that is not immediately obvious without the talking character, like this month’s special, then they can be useful.

8. Classifieds Ads Section Again, this is an item that has been around for ages. There are scripts that are easy to install that will help you offer a classified ad section to your website.

However, remember, you are responsible for every website you link to. Linking to bad websites will hurt you from an seo point of view. Allowing everyone to place a classified ad and a link to their website is inviting spammers, scammers, pornsters, and others to get links from your site to their site. If you are going to spend the time to approve every ad, then it can still be a useful tool.

9. Traffic Exchange Scripts Reciprocal links are dead. Don’t even consider a traffic exchange script or a webring.

10. Search My Website Scripts are actually very useful if your website is over 20 pages with a lot of content. It provides another way for users to find what they are looking for. You cannot make it too easy for users to navigate your website.

There are a lot of other website addons not covered here, but these are the most popular. In the next chapter we will move on to promoting your website after you have it built.

SEO Service #1: Pay Per Click Advertising
Pay per click advertising is perhaps the best targeted traffic tool online. With properly written ads, you can drive targeted traffic to any page on your website. If you optimize your ads to the landing pages that you want traffic driven to then you will have a great traffic driving tool that pays you well.

It’s up in the air as to whether there are additional SEO benefits for pay per click advertising, but that it drives targeted traffic is undisputed. You set the price you want to pay for clicks and the pay per click company does the rest.

SEO Service #2: Forum Posting
Forum posting is a service that many people don’t understand. The idea is not to blatantly advertise your services. That’s what pay per click is for. But forum posting can be used for company branding and traffic building, not to mention link popularity.

The first thing you want to do when you sign up for a forum is to create your signature link. Most forums allow you to create a signature that will appear with every comment you write. Most forums will also allow you have a link in that signature. This is how you brand yourself in forums and drive traffic to your website. Those links, assuming they are not nofollow links, will also help you build link popularity. Now get out there and start posting!

For one thing, a forum post is a part of a thread. There may be 100 other responses in that thread or there may be just one. But the thread is as much a part of the SEO as each individual post within the thread.

The first rule of forum posting is to stay on topic. If a forum post thread is about football vs. baseball then you should stay on that topic. If you write a post on that thread that is about auto mechanics and has nothing at all to do with the topic then you aren’t really responding to the discussion. But it also weakens the SEO of your forum post.

The search engines treat each forum post like a separate web page. Even if the post only has one sentence in it, the post can still rank in the search engines for a key phrase. But if it is off topic from the rest of the posts in the same thread then it will likely not be optimized for any keyword well enough to rank at all. On the other hand, if there are several posts in the same thread that use the same keyword then each post in that thread is optimized for that keyword and has an equal chance of ranking for it.

The relationship between forum posts in the same thread is much like the relationship between separate web pages on the same website. The website’s overall theme is a consideration, but the search engines don’t rank every web page on the website using the same keywords. The look at every web page on its own merit. This is why individual web pages can rank higher than others on the same website for certain keywords. By the same token, certain forum posts within the same thread can rank higher for certain keywords than other posts in the same thread. You just have to optimize your forum posts using the same principles as you do when optimizing your web pages, but in such a way that you consider the entire thread to which you are responding. Remember, nothing on the World Wide Web exists in an SEO vacuum.

Learn More About Forum Posting

There are multiple purposes to most online marketing strategies and forum posts is no exception. Yes, you can build inbound links, but that’s not all you’re doing. You also want to build relationships and drive traffic to your website so you could say that forum posting has three primary benefits:

• Link Building
• Traffic Building
• Relationship Building

As you can see, it’s a building enterprise.

Link Building With Forum Posts
Forum posts used to be one of the best inbound link building tools on the Internet, but there have been some changes to the way most forums are managed today that make link building a bit more of a challenge. The link building benefits have not disappeared completely, but many forum managers discourage forum posts for the sake of link building and have implemented policies that make forum posting more of an exercise.

Two policies, in particular, come to mind when I think about new challenges that forum posters must overcome. The first policy is the policy of “nofollow.” Yes, some forum managers have instituted a “nofollow” policy on all links from the forum to any other website, particularly signature links. That bites! You need to carefully read forum policies and guidelines if you expect to receive link building benefits from your forum posts.

The second policy that comes to mind is the delay signature link policy. This policy is in place to prevent spammers. Instead of making every link a “nofollow” link to combat forum spam, the delayed signature link is a compromise between the forum manager and the forum posters he wants to keep coming back again and again. Most spammers will not stick around a forum long enough to gain this benefit so it does discourage spam to a great degree. The policy simply requires forum participants to make so many posts before they get the benefit of adding links to any of their posts – and that includes signature links.

If you are patient enough to wait out the delayed signature link policy then it is well worth the wait with many forums. You might have wait until you have made 10 or 20 posts, but then once you have “passed the test,” you can see the value in the links. With “nofollow,” you have to decide whether losing the link building benefit is well worth the other benefits you receive from from forum posting.

Traffic Building With Forum Posts
Another benefit of posting in forums is building traffic to your website. With well trafficked forums this benefit alone can be well worth your efforts. You are there, after all, to build business and there is no better way to do that than by driving traffic to your website. Inbound links are great for SEO. They can push your website up in the search engine rankings, but targeted traffic will lead to direct business and that’s what you want.

Using Forums To Build Relationships
Perhaps the best benefit from forum posting is the ability to build direct relationships with people you meet in the forums. By building relationships with other forum participants, you not only will get their traffic and they get to know you better and trust you, but once you have built their trust then they will refer their friends and colleagues to you. That is word of mouth advertising, my friend. The best that money can buy. That’s what business is all about and every time you make a new friend in a forum you are building trust and leverage for your future. That beats all the links that money can buy.

You have 10 different types;

1. The Guru: They’re right just because they say so.

2. The Rich Person: They’re right because they have made more money than all other webmasters combined. Just ask them. They only hang out on the forum to pass the time and help those of us that are beneath them and totally clueless compared to them.

3. The Dinosaur: He’s right because he’s been doing seo since 1883. His covered wagon/office was busy back in Tombstone when he managed Marshall Earp’s website.

4. The Secret Agent: They’re right because they have secret information from secret sources that they cannot reveal to you or they’d have to kill you.

5. The Alias:They are really a very well-known seo guru that you would have heard of if they were to tell you who they really are. Suffice it to say they have to use a different name here because they don’t want too many people asking them questions.

6. The Hypester: If you will just buy the ebook or program he or she is telling you about this week and kindly adding theiraffiliate link for in their post, all of your seo troubles will be over. You’ll be a millionaire in just a few weeks. The only question is if they know how to make millions, why do they need the $9 affiliate commission for the link they is sending you to?

7. The Answer Person: He or she doesn’t really have the answers but he is nice enough to go look up what someone else said the answer was, then they’ll take credit for it as their own. They may even be known to copy the answer that was already given and post it. Then they’ll post again to say “Hey! I see such and such already told you about that above my post! Shows we’re on the same page and both right!”

8. The Argument Person: This one will wait for someone to post an answer just so they can give a different answer. they’ll have references to prove the first person wrong too. They want to be the one that corrects everyone else all the time.

9. Mr. or Mrs. Popularity: They have been posting on this forum longer than anyone else and have several other members totally convinced they know everything. So disagree with them at your own peril. Everyone will know you are wrong because you disagreed with the most popular person there. They are popular, so they must be right.

10. The Moderator: Usually works for free under the assumption that they will get well known and make money somehow, someday, because of that. They are always right because they have the power to ban you. Power equals knowledge everytime.

One note about moderators. There are some who do it because they genuinely want to help people. You’ll be able to tell the difference very easily. Just read all their posts. If 50% of their posts are about banning people or arguing with members, they fit into number 10 above.

Do you know any of these people from the forums you visit? Are you one of them?

SEO, Content, and Link Building Stategies that work
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But really, all SEO boils down to two things – the content on your website and everything else.

On-Page SEO

Let’s talk a minute about the content on your website. First, search engines don’t index websites. They index web pages. That’s an important distinction because you must view each web page as a separate entity with the search engines. The elements of your on-page SEO include:

• Text content
• Photos and images
• Videos
• Podcasts
• Headlines and subheadlines
• Meta tags
• Other tags
• Code to content ratio
• Design, navigation, and infrastructure issues

The primary thing to consider with your on-page content elements is that they all need to work together. Not necessarily for SEO purposes, but for design purposes as well. You really need to think about how you want your web pages to look (will you use a template, design every page with a unique look, etc.) and how you want the pages to connect as well. You have to make navigation through your site easy for your visitors so that they can find what they are looking for when they get to your website. You can do that and keep you on-page website elements SEOd for maximum benefit.

On-page SEO, especially when it relates to your content, is about two things (keywords and linnks). How you manage these two elements means a lot. But these are not by any means your only considerations. It is important to also make your on-page SEO elements work with your off-page SEO elements.

Off-Page SEO

While on-page SEO is about links and keywords, with some design and navigation considerations as well, off-page SEO is a little simpler. You really want to focus on links. Keywords are important only to the degree that they are used to link back to your website. In a word, inbound links is the name of the game.

When building links, there are various strategies and they all have their place. I highly recommend making a list of important keywords. To start, pick 10 of your most valuable keywords or keyword phrases (don’t pick the same ones or ones that are too related) and make them your anchor text phrases. Anchor text is simply the name for keyword text links.

Let’s say you are a basket weaver. You don’t want all of your anchor text links to have the word basket in them. Come up with some useful synonyms. Start with 10. You can expand your list later. But think up 10 keyword phrases that are different and unique enough that they would appeal to different segments of your target market, but that are related to your topic enough that they will prove to be of value. Next, start your link building campaign, which should consist of the following strategies:

• Article marketing
• Offsite business blog
• Forum posting
• Directory submissions
• Website memberships
• Blog commenting
• Social networking

You don’t want all of your anchor text to use the same phrases. That’s why you come up with 10 keyword phrases that you’ll use in all of your online activities. Whenever you post in a forum or make a comment on a blog, for instance, you’ll use your anchor text. In all of your membership profiles at social networking sites, directories, etc. you’ll use your anchor text. After you’ve built a sufficient number of anchor text links this way then you can add more phrases to your list.

Ongoing Changes To SEO

Always stay on top of the changes being made at the search engines because SEO is not an exact science. The guidelines frequently change and one strategy that works well today may not work so well tomorrow. Of course, no matter how much the strategies change, SEO will always be primarily about keywords and links. How you manage these two aspects of on-page and off-page SEO determines a lot in how successful you are in the long run.

SEO Service Provider, Article Content Provider, and Blog Content Provider also provide pay-per-click management services – ask us about them!
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