All Entries in the "Forums" Category

Forum Posts: Your Three Benefits

If you think that you can achieve instant results from forum posts you’d better think again. Results don’t happen overnight.

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.

Webmaster SEO Forums And The 10 Types Of Experts

If you go into almost any webmaster forum, you’ll find that everyone is pretty much an SEO expert. Ask a question and you will get a lot of answerrs, each of them different and each absolutely sure they are correct.

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?

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On-Page SEO vs. Off-Page SEO: Which Is More Important?

When talking about SEO, there are many ways you can break it down into categories. This vs. that. Good vs. bad. Black hat/white hat. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

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.

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