Forum postings – Two pronged SEO benefits

Sometimes things come as surprise and sometimes the same things are plated in a platter for you as a gift. Forum participation, forum posting and commenting gives free web traffic and helps in building back links, two pronged benefits, plated in the platter and served to you for free. We have to take bold internet marketing steps after we learn how to handle our SEO. Learning along the way and take the benefits of load of information available on the net, deciphered by the experts who detail out their experiences.

Google updates and the current SEO strategies point out towards building links, one way back links, which, as the master SEO’s say is the natural way of building links. If these links coming from the authority websites from the same market niche or from the relevant websites, these link carry more weight and helps in strengthening the hold on the SERPs.

Forum Participation

As explained by many experts, forum participation helps in building:

a) Two way conversation
b) Helps you to promote your brand
c) Helps you to establish your say in the market niche
d) Helps you to know your customers needs and market preferences
e) Helps you to understand your competition’s business tactics
f) Helps you to create a buzz word for your products and services
g) Helps you to get free web traffic
h) Helps you to get authority back links

Out of so many benefits detailed above, the search engine optimizers focus on two, which are deemed to be most important as far as SEO is concerned.

1. Free Web Traffic
2. Back links

Why are forums so important in the web market place?

Forums are highly visited sites. Especially high page rank forms are Google’s hot favorite. With many people visiting these forums every hour, the search engine spiders’ visit these forums frequently hence index every conversation taking place. The links left by the participants in the signatures are usually clicked through by the participants and hence, the more web traffic flows and the links left by you help in getting back links from these forums.

3 Steps to Off Page SEO

Search Engine Optimization is a huge topic to discuss. No loose ends make things worse and make your SEO effort go down the drain. We need specialists to work on our SEO projects or else we will get entangled in the hit and run situation where we would keep fighting our wits and arguing with ourselves as to why doesn’t our SEO effort get us to the top. We will end up saying, like so many other people do, that “Search engines hate SEO”. The fact is they love it. This is the element that helps them to be in business. Search engine do encourage SEO and to keep the ethical competition the search engines loves to keep the search engine optimizers on their toes.

We have time and again read about on-page SEO or the on-site SEO, that is the tweaking the on page elements of the web page to make it search engine ready. The page than propels the Google BOT and other search engine spiders to index the page and keep it handy to return the page in the SERPs when a query is made.

Off Page SEO hold some special propositions. It is, as we know, performed while staying away from the website. This is not to say that it has nothing to do with the web pages we are optimized, but it works in conjunction with the on page elements. Off Page SEO gets us back links and free web traffic.

Out of many off page optimization methods the following 3 steps help us getting the back links and also help in propelling many web visitors to click on our website links that they come across.

Forum Participation – Niche forum help. Business and industry related forum participation gears up interest in our web pages. We talk to the industry related people, we communicate with the target market, leave the links of our web pages and hence, create a buzz. In this effort, every conversation that we leave must be optimized, embedded with the search terms to trigger the interest of the search engines in our conversation.

Blogging – Another way of creating special buzz word for our business, products and services. Blog though seem to be one way conversation tool, but the element of blog commenting makes it a two way conversation medium, where people can post their comments on the blog as well as discuss on the particular topic.

Social networks – Social networks are the busiest marketing mediums on the internet. Breaking into conversation and leading the masses by leaving links to your website from where members can reach out to your website.

SEO tip of the day

We strive for high search engine ranking. True, we have gone through Big Daddy, Panda and Penguin. The jolts were enough for the search engine optimizers to give them hardcore learning, yet, sadly we are still in the learning phase. Certain things are written on the wall, large as life, for us to see, but we miss out and cry for help. Some SEO strategies too are written on the wall and have been explained time and again to help out the people in their SEO efforts, yet we miss out.

Today I received an email from a friend offering the SEO tip of the day. Ramapati Singhania said in the email, “Did you know that it is possible to rank visibly higher in the search engines with a PR of 5 than it is with a PR of 8? It's true! Don't be obsessed over Page Rank. Focus on building true relevancy.”

We need to understand the depth of the message when we start building our SEO strategy. 

Defining the word relevance, the web dictionaries state “Pertinence to the matter at hand”. The definition gives us the clear cut road. Walking on this path chalks out the clear cut strategy that we have to build out web pages, our content, our graphics, our HTML elements close to our matter at hand, i.e. our business. If we are selling products, services or giving out information, we need to:

• Research keywords, research the most relevant words or search terms to our products and services or the information that we are disseminating. 
• Use these keywords in the Meta Tags
• Use these keywords when we are building website content
• Create relevance of images and graphics to our subject matter
• Strive to get links from the relevant sites

Relevance is the most important factor in our SEO strategy. It ensures that the site would be indexed by the search engine and kept in the proper category while the relevant links help in the creating a strong footing on the search engines. If the links are coming from the a relevant and authority site, does not matter if the belongs for page rank 5 i/o page rank 8, your website would definitely climb the ladder and get the deserved visibility on the SERPs.

SEO – Master the game or fade away

Not many of us have still mastered the game. We think or we perceive that we know it all, but the geniuses out there, the search engine makers, have always succeeded us beating the search engine optimizers at the game of SEO. Search engine are made for the web visitors, for them to find things, search and learn and interact with the businesses to buy the products, services or get the required information. This gives the online marketers as open field to create an effective presence through ethical means, not the way many of our friends did, used black hat techniques and exploited the opportunities available to us.

How in the world we have thought that we could use these engines to make big money overnight. The opportunity exists for everyone to showcase the products, take ethical steps to promote but by using unfair means, mastering the black hat techniques, the optimizers had shortened their web visibility through the search engines and found themselves out of scene, fading away from the glory of top search engine ranking.

• On-Site SEO – The basics of SEO where we can tweak the HTML tags, build keyword laden, but not keyword stuffed web content, Optimize images and graphics and make the web presentation of our company search engine friendly. This is the task that is rather easy to master and most of our friends play their SEO game around the on page SEO, shying away from the real ball game.
• Off Page SEO – Here we must understand that in SEO there are no short cuts. This is the place where the real juice is. To help our search engine friendly website to hold ground, we must plug in some of the back links. These come naturally, with all the off page optimization efforts whether we are blogging, article and submitting articles, issuing or publishing press releases, or when we are indulging in social media marketing or participating in forums, we are trying to build links the natural way.

We need to master the ethical SEO game that could lead our websites and web presence through to the top of the organic search engine results. The white hat way. Here the air is clean, no threats of being dumped by the search engine exists. We need patience and hard work. We need to wait for longer time that we would have waited through other means; hence, without taking sort cuts we can secure ourselves and our existence on the web.

Silly mistakes made while hiring a SEO Company

Hiring a SEO company to optimize your website is necessary. Not everyone is an optimizer neither it’s as easy as 123 to learn SEO. Just by reading a few articles we cannot be sure that we can optimize our website by ourselves. We have to go through the learning curve; hence, trial and error is the only path that we can walk on. If you have time to go through the hit and run process and if you can wait till you can become a SEO expert, Good Luck to you, but in essence, I think that entrepreneurs don’t have time to learn everything that comes in their way, they need to hire specialists for different jobs that they need to get done, and they, themselves focus on the hardcore business activities that help them generate profits. Hence, we feel the need to hire SEO specialists who can optimize our websites and get us to achieve top search engine ranking, top places on the SERP’s for the keywords selected to optimize the website.

The efforts to find the best SEO company, we make mistakes. May be our lack of knowledge hurts our purpose and we fall for greasy talk. Here we must be careful before signing the contract, wait for few days and hunt through the resources available. I have seen people making some silly mistakes like:

a)      Falling for guarantees of 1^st position on Google search results. No one an guarantee 1^st spot in the organic search results. These positions are achieved overtime and through lots of ethical hard work.

b)      Not checking the current search engine ranking of the SEO Company claiming to get your website on the 1^st spot.

c)       Not checking the ranking of the client’s websites of the SEO Company.

d)      Not getting in touch with the clients of the SEO company to inquire about the service quality

e)      Not requesting ranking reports, neither requesting for Google Analytics

f)       Paying full SEO fee in advance

Hiring a SEO Company is never an easy task. You can ask the SEO Company to prove their worth before signing the contract.

Off Page SEO

Many off-page search engine optimization techniques hold prominence today when we discuss SEO. Unlike on-site factors that have been taken off from the search engine concentration zone. Off page is tedious, but if we put is straight, Off Page or Off Site optimization is a strategy driven optimization program that help in building back links naturally. We have to say goodbye to link farms or to reciprocal linking. Thanks to our friends who manipulated the search engines algorithm to get to the top of the search engine search results, they have now made the off page SEO a more uphill task. 

Off Page Optimization is simply defined as all the activities done to optimize a website while staying away from the web pages is called off page SEO. The juice of off page optimization is the back links that we get from other websites; mostly from the relevant websites holding higher Google page rank help us to strengthen our hold on the search engines. 

What do we need to do? 

We need to get involved with more hardcore SEO techniques like:

1. Submit website to web directories – we must make sure to select the proper category for our business niche. Business directories with Page Rank 4 or higher will give your web pages boost.
2. Write articles – Educative articles and submit them to the article directories.
3. Blogs – Build blogs.
4. Participating in Forums - Do follow forums are the best arena to market your products and get yourself knows. Also leaving link of your website will help in getting back links.
5. Social bookmarking – Yet another way to spread the word. Leave the links of your blogs and web pages on the social bookmarking sites. The search engine spiders crawl such sites frequently to update the uploaded content, we get links and ranking for this effort.
6. Social Networks – These busy sites have the huge member base. Here you can share links, lead the members and your friends to your articles and blog posts and get much of the qualified web traffic to your web pages. Links are the actual fruit of this effort too.

SEO Strategy

To many people SEO is still an alien word, to some it means to apply technology to get your website up on the search results with the snap of the fingers. To us, the professionals, SEO is the science which is getting complicated day by day. Search engine strive to provide the best relevant and exact results to the web users and in this effort make add on to the features and drop some of the old ones leading to confusion for many people who work on set strategies.

From Big Daddy update to Panda and now to Penguin we have seen the shift. We have repented not to anticipate the moves and hence many rumors like “Google Hates SEO” were heard. Black hat specialists led the search engines to change the ranking strategies. Some of the things that worked earlier do not work anymore. Things that were more relevant before and now less relevant and hence more human factor is not inbuilt into the SEO strategies.

What do we need to do?

This is typically a question that I had been asking for quite some time now. The answer was simple, be natural. These are the days of semantic search being natural will help you to lead

The red blood cells behind your SEO strategy are the keywords that we select for optimizing our web pages. To arrive at the right keyword, we must learn about our business prospects interests, their search habits, the keywords and keyword phrases being used by them when they are searching online, hence, to pump up more fresh oxygen, the relevance of keywords and their correlation with the your website content is important.

The next most important element is building content, the web copy. Customer oriented content build for the website viewers is an important element. Keyword stuffed web content that does not make sense to the readers does not work anymore. It works best to chase the website visitors away.

Visitors and the web users are always central to the SEO strategy. We build websites for the visitors and hence must make all the efforts to fulfill their need and their thirst for information. Using the selected relevant keywords prudently will help in bridging the gap and make our website visible to the people surfing the net.

Onsite SEO

SEO is an important element that must not be overlooked while developing and designing a website. Onsite SEO, ruled the SEO horizon once, but, with the way optimizer manipulated the search engines and the users got junk search engine results, Google made the shift. It dawned later to that search engines are made for the user, as the websites too are made for the users. The users should be the beneficiary of the internet marketing efforts and as such, onsite SEO which held much ground suddenly was left to occupy around 30% of the total search engine optimization importance. The balance 70% weight went to off page SEO which led the optimizers to build the off page SEO structure in a more natural manner. Manipulation hence became difficult.

With this 30% of weight age, still onsite SEO is the most important part of all SEO efforts. It creates the base or we can say the SEO structure that can help in building off page techniques.  Onsite SEO works and works pretty well if you do your homework right. Bungle up and you will find yourself and your website in hot waters on the search engines. 

We aim for online visibility. Our aim or our target is the first spot on the search engine results pages (SERPs) through ethical, organic search engine optimization. This takes us to the first steps of on page SEO, that is, to search for the relevant keywords, the words that our target market uses to search for the products and services we deal in. Keyword research is the backbone of SEO activities that take place from hereon whether it is the on-page SEO or the off page optimization.

Our next steps in onsite SEO are as follows:

• Meta Tags Building – Meta Title Tag, Meta Description Tag and Meta Keyword Tag
• Building keyword rich web content – beware of the keyword density, do not stuff keywords
• Optimize images and optimize videos that are embedded on your web pages
• Build site Map

These are for sure a few things to do on the on-page optimization, but we need to build these prudently as these are the basics or we can say that these steps give us strong foot hold when we start dealing with off page optimization.

Why is Local SEO important?

Here we go again talking about SEO. This time we will turn toward local search engine optimization. Why is it important? To answer this let me ask one more question – Where would you look for if you need to hire a lawyer? Locally off-course! You wouldn't like to go and hire an attorney from China to fight your legal battle in New York.

This is why local SEO is important. Most of look us for stuff, that is, products and services available locally within our town or city. We can venture out to another state to buy stuff if we don’t get it in our town but we prefer to remain within our country or the region we live in. 

We used to scan through Yellow pages to find services and products. Now people conduct an internet search, even to scan through the yellow pages, we prefer to scan through the online yellow pages to find a local service provider. Surely, the days of physical yellow pages are gone and for the sake of our consumers we must optimize our sites for local search. If not, we will be missing tons of local customers who are standing right at our doorsteps, waiting for us to lead them to our business place.

Small business owners are essentially local business operators who can thrive using the right approach. Being visible to the local customer’s eyes is the key towards their online marketing game. 

We need to:

• Research local keywords – Long tail ends will help
• Start building a local network – your Facebook account will help you here.
• Embed your physical local address, detail out your location.
• Get your website listed in the local business directories on-line
• Use your “Customer attitude” to perceive what your customers will be searching for
• Use your local phone number on the web. This will help attracting local customers

Internet has grown too big overtime. We were and many of us still are into the rat race of getting the top search engine rankings for global searches, paying hands full of money to the SEOs but if we stop and think, aren't we wasting our time for optimizing for over crowded web sphere. Optimizing for local searches will give us some breathing space and get the local customers some good quality search results, and give us more customers.

Optimizing Website for Yahoo

We see and hear a lot of chat for Google SEO. In this hype of Google, we have somewhat ignored other important search engines. Yahoo for one has been there when Google was born and was the most used search engine alongside MSN. Every since Google occupied the search sphere, Yahoo has been sidelined but is still being used by handful of people who prefer to search through Yahoo as well to search the web for products, services and information.

The point to note here is that we must not forget that optimizing our websites for Yahoo as well is equally important. We get web visitors from Yahoo and some really serious ones too. While preparing our websites for search engine we must in build factors that are equally important for Yahoo optimization as well.

The important factor is that we cannot optimize separately for different search engines i.e. if we optimize for Yahoo only we will miss out Google and like wise if we optimize for MSN only our website will fail to find the right top spot in Yahoo and Google. We have to be genius and create a harmony, develop a balance and build in the SEO features acceptable to the algorithm of the three most important search engines.

In Yahoo SEO things might seem similar to Google SEO, but careful handling and prudent ethical steps need to be taken. These are

• Meta Title Tag Building – These are as important to Yahoo and these are important to Google. Placing the relevant keywords ethically help in Yahoo optimization. The length of meta title tag for Yahoo must be equal to 80 characters.
• Meta Description Tag – This carries the same important too. Unique words must be used to describe the contents of the web page. Hence, here too, the use of relevant keywords is encouraged but stuffing is not like by Yahoo as well. Be ware and use your SEO skills ethically. Do not extend the length of Meta Description Tag over 200 characters.
• Mete Keyword Tag – This tag still is important for Yahoo. Keyword consistency is important here. Use the same keywords as being used by you in building Title Tag and the Description Tag and also use the keywords being used by you in the website content. Make sure that you separate keywords by commas and do not use more than 12 keywords in the Meta Keyword Tag. Avoid repetition of keywords in this Meta Tag.