Tips On How To Get A Better Forum Marketing Strategy

What people tend to forget is that everything in SEO is done progressively and takes time. Don’t expect to get results overnight after you wrote a few posts. Forum posting is something that should be done on regular basis. A webmaster should post or answer a few threads a day for several months in order to see some results from it. There are some tips and techniques that can be used in order to accelerate the procedure of forum posting.

Relevant & High Quality Forums

Conduct a thorough research on Google to find which forums are the most relevant to your everyday business. Once you found a few of them, make sure that they are related to the products, services, or whatever it is that you sell or promote. Signing up to a forum that has no relation whatsoever to your everyday business won’t be very useful because you won’t be able to quench the users needs.

Participation

Once signed up to a forum, the job won’t get done by itself, you must participate and be active by answering threads with relevant and good answers. Answering “I agree” or “I disagree” won’t get you too far and it might actually degrade your authority on that forum. Offer your help and knowledge for free to anyone in need.

Signature

A signature is one of the most important part of forum posting. You should put relevant keywords in your signature as anchor texts and link it back to your website. Most of the forums out there give you the option to put a signature but most of them require you to have  certain amount of posts or to to be a member for a certain amount of time before being allowed to have a signature. Use this wisely because it is one of the main ways to attract traffic from a forum to your website.

Etiquette

I am an active forum poster and blogger and I have to admit that sometimes, users make me want to lose it. Nevertheless, you must always stay polite and follow the forum ethics. Never get out of hand because it can greatly downgrade your authority in that forum no matter how popular you are. Another sign of ethical behavior is keeping the forum spam free. Only post content that you judge necessary to the forum and need of the community.

Pertinent Questions

Often times, I see very silly questions that get posted in forums. Avoiding this is very important because most users won’t even reply with an answer. Make sure that you did some kind of research on Google to help you find an answer. If after your research you still cannot find an answer to your question, then proceed into posting your question in the forum. If your question is very pertinent and may help many other users, it might even be used as a “sticky” thread.

Providing Good Answers

This is very important because this is how you will build yourself a name and a reputation in the forum. If you always provide useful and relevant answers, users will most probably always come read your threads. Providing false and non-relevant answers can cause you to lose a lot of authority in the forum.

Tips For Better Forum Marketing by MetaSEO

But the “nofollow” attribute can be useful, for example if you wish to “tighten” your internal linking and keep all of your web authority focused certain pages. This attribute is also used by default in many CMS platforms such as Drupal and WordPress, which makes it the most commonly used outgoing link attribute on the net.  There are many myths and theories revolving around this attribute and this article is going to shed some light on all these issues.

Its Origins

Back in 2005, there was a big blog spamming problem that affected a lot of Google’s SERPs. Why you may ask? Well like we all know, link building is the main way of getting ranked higher on seach engines, so people would go on blogs and just spam them with irrelevant and useless comments just to get a link back to their website. Unfortunately, this greatly affected the SERPs and made them somewhat irrelevant to the queries. For this reason, Google’s Web Spam team developed and patented this attribute.

What Is It Used For

There are many different reasons and scenarios where the “rel=nofollow” attribute should be used but I will only be giving you the main ones.

• Linking to Websites: If you are linking to another website from yours, you might want to add the “nofollow” tag in order to keep the authority on your page and not pass any link juice. It is also essential to add this tag when linking to websites you don’t necessarily trust.
• RSS FeedBurner: Using a NoFollow attribute on your RSS FeedBurner link is very important because it keeps your link juice in your web page and also it helps to prevent duplicate content.
• Internal Linking: You should use a NoFollow attribute whenever you’re linking pages of your website that are not important. This will help concentrate your link juice to the pages that need it most. I suggest using this attribute when you’re linking to pages such as “Contact Us”, “Register”, “Login”, etc. Here is Matt Cutts take on this issue.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What It Isn’t Used For

Many people think that by using the “rel=nofollow” attribute, they are blocking the search engine from accessing some content or preventing it from being indexed. This is totally wrong and unlike most people think, the search engine actually follows those links and takes a look at what is on the other side of the link but doesn’t give any authority. This means that the bot will crawl and notice the links but it won’t give them any weight.

If you would like to block the search engine to access or index certain pages or content of your website, the use of a Robots Exclusion Protocol (better known as robots.txt) is best. Actually this and the Meta Robots are the only ways to give specific orders to the search engine.

Now For The Big Question

The time has come to answer the question that has been lurking in the mind of webmasters. Does Google give any kind of weight or passes link juice to inbound links with the “rel=nofollow” attribute? The answer is no, Google doesn’t give any weight to inbound links with this attribute. Why? Well the whole concept of this attribute was to help search engines block spammy links from untrusted and unsecure websites. Also, it helped blog owners clean up their comments because they were all filled of outgoing links that weren’t relevant to the content. Users would comment irrelevant things just to get a inbound link pointing to their website.

Another thing I could add is that the rel=nofollow attribute is also used to retain link juice and Page Rank to a certain webpage. So it makes sense that Google won’t give any kind of link juice or ranking weight to those links. Even though the search engines will crawl and index them, he won’t give any kind of ranking power.

Do NoFollow Links Carry Link Juice by MetaSEO

Geo-Location Information

There  a few factors that influence your geo-location of a website to the search engine’s eyes. First off, it looks at the language the content is written in. If the content is Russian,  that webpage will be able to rank much better in Google.ru (the Russian Google).The traffic information is also taken into notice as a geo-location factor. Another factor that a search engine notes is if the incoming links are from the relevant country. People believe that geographic information from social media’s like Facebook and Twitter can affect your geo-location. However, this statement is only a myth and has never been confirmed. Below is a video by Matt Cutts explaining how meta geo tags may affect your rankings.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Most of the major search engines use the physical location of your website’s server to determine in which country you should be ranked. This location has an even bigger impact on your rankings when it is a TLD such as .com, .net, .org, etc. especially if the webmaster hasn’t activated the Geo Targeting feature in Google Webmaster Tools. Most of the time when webmasters do everything right for their websites’ optimization and don’t receive the wanted results, it is most probably because the geo-targeting hasn’t been set properly or hasn’t been set at all.

Usability & Speed Of The Website

Offering your users a pleasant experience when the land on your website is crucial. Having a good navigation menu that is easy to understand and simple to use and making sure that your website’s speed is solid can greatly help yo increase your rankings, organic traffic, and Click-Through Rate (CTR). After the Google Panda update, Googlebot’s algorithm had been modified to help detect which website offer good user experience and which do not.

Social Medias

The following information was a myth for a very long amount of time. However, Google and Bing confirmed that they use your social media reputation as a ranking factor. So for example, the amount of likes your Facebook page has, how many times your tweets got re-tweeted on Twitter, how many followers you have on Twitter, and so on. The search engine will note that you have some type of influence on internet users and can help you increase your SERPs rankings. You will find below a video of Matt Cutts explaining how Social Media websites have influence on your rankings.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Speaking of Matt Cutts and Google, Google recently released their own social media metric called the “Google +1″ that mimics the Facebook “Like” button. This button developed by Google allows users to give a “+1″ to a certain web page, this can potentially increase your rankings because Google may think that given page is highly relevant to the query. However, a user must be signed in his Google account in order to be able to vote.

3 Important Less Known Rankings Factors by MetaSEO

Short & Precise

Just like when writing an article, nobody wants to read an article that is extremely long. User tend to like short and precise articles that are straight forward. Well it is the same with videos, make sure that your video ad isn’t too long nor too short. Another thing that you should note is the information that is given in the video. Make it very informative so that your users will find it handy and useful. For an ad video, I would say anywhere between 30 secs & 1:30 minutes is perfect. For an information video try to keep it between 3 and 5 minutes.

Title

This is a very important step in order to get your video optimized. Make it search friendly and give it a title that you plan to promote the video with. Just like in traditional SEO, your video’s title should contain the main keywords for which you wish to be ranked for. Do not stuff your title with keywords, make it look natural. A title that is over stuffed with keywords doesn’t look attractive at all and might even repulse users to come take a look at your video.

Social Networks

Once your video is up and running, bookmark your video in some of the major social networks so it can be accessible and viewed by thousands of people. I would recommend Facebook and Twitter to start off with. You could even ask some of your friends to share it on their wall so your video will get an even bigger visibility. Twitter is also a good place to post your video. Your best shot would be to submit your video to social network websites specifically made for videos.

Meta Tags

Just like in any web page, you may also optimize your video’s meta tags. So just like you would do in your web page, add your main keywords and the keywords for which you wish to rank for in those meta tags. Giving a short, relevant, and precise meta description to your video is crucial because users will read the description of your video before clicking on it to see if it answers their needs.

Tags

Adding tags to your video is one of the main way to increase your video’s visibility. By so, you learn that giving your video the proper tags is very important, I recommend using keywords that are relevant to what is being displayed in the video or the market you are targeting.

Articles

Creating an article related to your video is a good idea because you will be able to promote your article in article directories. Remember to place 2 – 3 backlinks pointing back to your YouTube video. Don’t forget to optimize the anchor text of those backlinks as well with keywords that are relevant to what is being displayed in the video. By doing all the above, if your article is good and gets picked up by other users, your video will have better chances of getting ranked high because of the links that you included in the article.

Video Directories

Submitting your video to major video sharing websites is important because it will give your video a bigger web visibility and will be accessible to a lot more people. I would recommend submitting the embed version of the video because it will count as a backlink to your original YouTube video and people will know that if they ever wish to find that video again it could be found on YouTube.

Blog Promotion

Just like the article submission, you can also create blog posts that are related to the video that you are trying to optimize. By doing so you increase the amount of backlinks pointing to your video which will increase your video’s ranking through search. Even here, always remember to properly optimize your anchor text when linking back to your pages, video etc. Once the blog post is complete and published, you should share it on social media websites to give your blog post the maximum visibility possible.

Commenting

Commenting on other user’s videos that are relevant to yours is good because it will get you known and will build you an authority. Obviously the commenting should be done properly and in ethical manners. This can also help increase the traffic of your video because if your comments are relevant and help people, users may actually visit your channel and take a look at all your videos, hence increase your video’s traffic.

9 Tips To Optimize Your YouTube Videos by MetaSEO

Google Has A New WebSpam Reporting Form

There was always an option in Google to report spam, however this time it is an improved version with a brand new reporting form. This version provides users with more specific and profound options so that it is much easier to trace. This has the chance to greatly diminish the amount of webspam in search engines, thereby making the search results much more accurate.

Why Is A New Form Needed ?

The reason for this new reporting form is that, in the past, the reports were reported with single web forms. As a result, it took the spam reports a longer time to reach the proper team in order to take care of the issue. With the new form, it is so precise that it reaches the respective team almost instantly after it is submitted. It is important that users use this new feature given to us by Google because we should all contribute to help clean our internet and search engines of all webspams.

Google Launches New WebSpam Reporting Form by MetaSEO

This new feature may help users in many different ways such as: let’s say you just launched a new website or added a few key web pages to your website, you can use this feature to send the GoogleBot to find and crawl them instantly instead of waiting for the GoogleBot to come naturally and discover all your new web pages. Now this feature isn’t only for new web pages, if you brought updates to existing pages and you would like them to be indexed without any delay, this option can help you as well.

Submitting Your URL

Before being able to submit a URL, you will first have to “Fetch” that URL. To do so, click on “Diagnostics” then “Fetch As GoogleBot” and write down the URL you wish to fetch. If the URL was fetched successfully, you will see a “Submit to Index” link appear next to the URL.

Once the “Submit To Index” button has been clicked, you’ll see a dialog box that will appear which will allow you to specify whether you would like submit only one URL or the URL that its linking to.

If you are submitting individual URLs, know that there is a maximum of 50 submissions per week. If you submit URLs with all linked pages, your limit is of 10 per month.  The number of submissions you have left are in the “Fetch as GoogleBot” page.  Remember that all URLs that are submitted should point to web pages that have content and that could be relevant to a search query. Do not use this feature to submit videos or images, use sitemaps instead.

Google Webmaster Tools “Fetch As GoogleBot” Feature by MetaSEO

This service consists of creating and optimizing your Local Business Listing on the major search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo).

Technology has evolved and so did consumer behavior. People have adapted to technologies such as smartphones, netbooks, tablet pc’s and more. In order to follow the trend and benefit from a targeted audience, businesses must have a visibility window on the local search engine results.

According to Google, 25 percent of all searches are location-based. People use search engines such as Google to find local services and products.

Opening a printed local business listing directory is now something of the past. In fact, statistics have shown that more and more people find what they need through search engines such as Google. In the past couple years, mobile searching has grown to extreme numbers (5 Billion searches a day). Those are all platforms businesses need to be optimized for in order to target their audience.

Many people search for services and products on the go using their smartphones. Relevant local search queries done on mobile devices will bring up the Local Business Listings of the search engine. If you are not listed there for your industry keywords, you are losing huge potential business.

With MetaLocal, we create and optimize your local business listing on the major search engines. We couple that with monthly business listing maintenance in order for your local business to show on TOP of the search engine local places results and hence resulting in more traffic and sales to your business.

For all the details on our new Local Business Listing Optimization service, please visit MetaLocal

MetaLocal Launched – Local Business Listings Optimization by MetaSEO

Click here to view the embedded video.

By using Google Adwords Express, your local customers will be able to find your website or Google Places (Maps) page very quickly which can drastically increase your sales. In order to get started, you’ll need to provide some basic information about your business and create your own online ad.

Once signed up for Adwords Express, your campaign is automatically monitored by Adwords Express. This will help you find out which query matches your everyday business in order for it to be found very easily for users.

Just like Google Adwords, Adwords Express will only require you to pay once a user clicks on your ad. It also automatically adjusted certain ad specifics in order to provide you with the best ROI on your campaign. If you would like to start your own Adwords Express campaign today, visit www.google.com/awexpress.

Google Officially Launches AdWords Express by MetaSEO

If my ad/website appeared 100x and only got clicked on 5x, my CTR will be of 5%. There are many factors that can increase/decrease your CTR. Users tend to look for certain criteria before clicking on a result and we will help you meet them to the fullest.

Title Tag

This is a very important factor when you optimize your website, however webmasters tend to forget that they are mainly writing for the users. Therefore, this creates low quality titles that look irrelevant and sometimes spammy. Links with these kinds of titles tend to be ignored by users. In order to increase your CTR, use short titles that have a maximum of 70 characters. Be very descriptive and use a reasonable amount of keywords that will encourage a user to click on you. I recommend adding the company’s name at the end of the title because it makes the title look more professional.

Meta Description Tag

This is probably the most important factor to increase your CTR. Having a solid and relevant meta description is very important because it is the first description a user will get of your website. Look at it as a first impression of your website, you want that impression to be very positive on your users. You should explain what your webpage contains in a few brief but precise words and include your main keywords in the tag. The keywords will be “bolded” to match the user’s query. Write an attractive text that is appealing and that partially answers the user’s questions but not fully. This will create curiosity in the user who will most likely click on your link.

Sitelinks

Site links are links that help users navigate your website easier and they usually appear right below the SERPs results. Sitelinks don’t always appear in SERPs, they usually appear when the query is highly relevant to a result and when the result is a trusted website or brand. Having your sitelinks in your snippet can significantly increase your CTR because they tend to attract the attention of users and make it easier for them to navigate your website. Webmasters usually have very little control over their sitelinks because they are calculated using a complex algorithm, however, there are 2 techniques you could use to affect the sitelinks that are being displayed. Firstly, you should start by blocking all irrelevant sitelinks in your “Site Configuration Panel” in your Google Webmaster Tools. Secondly, make sure you have a good link architecture in your website so that the search engine bots will have an easy understand of the major headlines (sections) of your website.

Google Instant Preview

This gives users the opportunity to see a screenshot of the page to which the result is linking to. Regrettably, Google Instant Preview has trouble sometimes displaying flash content and as a result, sometimes the screenshot looks confusing and unprofessional. Make sure that your website has a nice design and looks professional because you will attract much more users that way. By taking a look at your instant preview, a user will see that your website looks professional and is organized, therefore it might encourage him to click on you, which will increase your CTR.

Social Layers

As we all know, Google created their own social layer called the “Google +1″ button, which is very similar to the Facebook “like” button. By having a lot of “+1″s, a user will be more encouraged to click on you because he will see that many people went on that particular website and took the time to give it a “+1″. Therefore meaning that it is most probably highly relevant to the user’s query and answers the user’s questions and needs.

Top 5 Ways To Increase Your Click-Through Rate (CTR) by MetaSEO

Click here to view the embedded video.

The basic functionalities are pretty straight forward, however it gets more complicated when using the advanced features. The reason being is that some options can greatly affect the SEO of your website. I will be discussing some important mistakes that MUST be avoided while configuring your Google Webmaster Tools.

Crawl Rate

In your GWT, you have a feature which allows you to choose how slow or fast you would like the Googlebot to crawl your website. Using this feature will obviously affect your crawl rate but it might affect the number of pages getting indexed per day.

Modifying The Crawl Rate Through GWT

Keep in mind that if this setting is changed to a high crawl rate, it might consume most of the bandwidth of your server which will create a very high loading time for your website. On the other hand, if you put a low crawl rate, the daily number of pages indexed will greatly decrease. In most cases, it is preferable to let Google decide which crawl rate if best for your website.

Crawler Access

Google gives your the option to see which sections of your website their crawler is allowed to crawl. This feature also gives you the possibility to create a Robots.txt file and request a URL removal. This option can help you if used properly, However, in the hand of an inexperienced user, great damage can be done to your SEO. If you misconfigured the robots.txt file, you might block the Googlebot from crawling and indexing certain sections of your website. This will result in your website to never appear in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Make sure you know what you are doing and only block a certain page if it is truly needed.

Sitelinks

As mentioned in previous articles, I am very active in various blogs and forums and I always see people asking “What is a sitelink?”. Well sitelinks are links that appear in SERPs and help users navigate your website easier directly from the SERPs. Sitelinks attract the attention of users and are calculated using a complex algorithm based on the link structure of your website and the anchor texts that are used in those links.

GWT Allows You To Block Unwanted Sitelinks

Now what the GWT allows you to do is to block any sitelinks which are not targeted, relevant, or useful for the users. Removing the wrong sitelinks can decrease your Click Through Rate (CTR) which will affect your SEO campaign.

Geo-Targeting

Geo-targeting is a very good option offered by the GWT. It allows a webmaster to target his website to a specific country. This feature is very useful if you are targeting a certain audience from a certain country. It is particularly helpful if you have a generic Top-Level-Domain (TLD) such as .com, .net, .org, etc. If your domain has a country specific TLD, it is pre-configured and it is not necessary to specify it in your GWT. In fact, for a country specific TLD, the geo-targeting with automatically be set and cannot be changed.

Geo-Target Your Users With GWT

By specifying which country you would like to target, you could significantly increase your rankings for the targeted country results. This feature should only be used if your website is targeting users from a specific country.

Changing Address

The GWT allows you to transfer your existing domain to a new one. This option is only available for domains and not sub-domains or sub-directories. Odds are that most webmasters never use this option but if one day you find the need to use it, make sure to be very attentive of what you are doing. In order to make the transfer successful, you MUST use a 301 redirect to permanently redirect the old webpages to the new ones. Do not forget the 301 redirect because it is crucial to complete the domain transfer. If you do not 301 redirect your pages, you might lose a significant amount of backlinks to your website as the old pages are not transferring the weight over to the new pages. If your old domain name is banned from Google, avoid using this feature. Here is a great article on How to Properly Change Your Domain Name for SEO.

Submitting Sitemap

Through the GWT, you are able to submit your sitemap which will radically increase the speed at which your website is indexed. This is an amazing feature because it makes the submission of your XML sitemap much easier, however this can cause some complications. One of them is that sometimes the XML sitemaps appear in SERPs and your competitors might be able to see them. If you wish for them not to be seen, simply “gzip” your sitemap and submit the .gz version in your Google Webmaster Tools.

Sitemap Submission Is Very Easy With GWT

Another complication probable is when you try to index a very large number of pages in a very short amount of time, and by very large I mean tens of thousands of web pages. Even though the XML sitemap can help speed up the indexation of your webpages, it can also raise suspicion and flag your website for a review. The Google Panda Update targets specifically websites with poor content that are trying to index huge amounts of webpages very fast. Sitemaps are very helpful if used properly, however they could be a killer if they are used incorrectly.

Mistakes To Avoid In Google Webmaster Tools by MetaSEO