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Finding the right SEO tools and resources can be challenging - but we’re here to make it a little easier on you. SEO forums and newsgroups can be very confusing to a person with no SEO experience. These forums and newsgroups are just so heavily populated that they can intimidate many new users.

The first rule regarding these situations is to just slowly try to integrate yourself into the community. Follow these rules closely and concisely so that you do not offend anybody:

1. Do not spam the forum with your problems. If you have a few things that you would like to discuss you will probably get help, but do not try to hog all of the assistance for yourself. For one thing, most of your questions have already been answered, believe it or not. There is generally a “search” option. Always use this before posting your problem.

2. Do not “Flame.” Flaming is a term used among forum dwellers to describe the behavior of “yelling” at people via the forum. This is generally associated with cursing, constant argument, typing in all caps to try to convey anger, and dismissing other people’s posts in an undignified fashion. There are other problems that are included in flaming, but I have given you the jist of it.

3. Never take a post off topic. If there is something that you would like to discuss that was inspired by a post on another topic, post a new topic in the appropriate board and explain where the topic was conceived. You may still want to reply to the post just to let people know that the topic has been created so that somebody else doesn’t take it off topic.

4. Do not “bump” your thread (or post). Bumping a post is when you reply to your own post in hopes of getting a response sooner. The only time that this is acceptable is if your thread has laid dormant for about a week. Bumped threads are very annoying to most forum users. Bumping posts on a regular basis will probably lead to a lack of interest in your posts and will probably contribute to a lack of support in your ventures.

6. Be friendly. There is no reason that you can’t be completely polite when posting on a forum. You will get very good response if you are simply polite in your post. Politeness in the world of forums includes making sure that you have communicated your problem carefully so that people attempting to help you can understand and provide answers to the best of their abilities.

7. Join in on the community favorites. Many forums now include “games” which are occasionally pretty fun. They are pretty much just there for if you are bored and waiting for a response to your other posts, but they are enjoyable if you keep up with them as many forum dwellers are quite articulate and witty.

Here’s a list of resources that you can use when you need help but you don’t want to pay for it.

Finding Groups.

Google makes discussion groups easy to find with their ‘Google Groups’ tool (groups.google.com). Go there and type in ’seo’ to see what’s on offer. Two popular groups are alt.internet.search-engines and alt.www.webmaster. If you don’t like Google’s groups, try Yahoo’s instead (groups.yahoo.com). Either of these sources will provide you with a pretty substantial list. Remember, regular search engine listings seem to apply here so generally you will see the best results towards the top of the listing.

dmoz.org is a good place to start: from their home page, you can browse down to any subject you want, and you should find at least one mailing list, discussion forum or message board in the listing.

There are several forums out there on the web that focus on SEO, and you can learn a lot from all of them, even if some of the discussions are over your head at first. Even ordinary searchers can learn a lot from following these discussions, as they tell you a lot about how search engines work.

Here are some useful forums: WebmasterWorld, Search Engine Watch Forums, ThreadWatch, Best Practices Search Engine Forums, cre8asite forums and the High Rankings Forum. Check them out.

About The Author:

Lawrence Andrews is an ePublisher, software developer, consultant, and author of numerous books. Visit his Private Label Content and Software site at http://www.lmamedia.com for more information about
SEO and PRL.

You may use this article freely on your website as long as this resource box is included, a link point back to my site, and this article remains unchanged! Copyright 2005 Lawrence Andrews

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Does the whole idea of Internet marketing intimidate you? Are you thinking of hiring a professional? Well, we’ve got great news for you. It’s really not difficult to do search engine optimization (SEO) yourself - you can save hundreds of dollars, and get the same results as the professionals do. You will probably get better results from highly qualified professionals, but you should definitely perform these do-it-yourself actions first. Once you’ve done some of this kind of work it will be easier to determine if a professional is worth his/her salt.

Basic SEO is very simple and easy - all it takes is the willingness to put in the work. Once you know the ropes, it’s not that difficult though it can be time consuming. The content of your website the focus of what SEO is all about. Here are the top points to think about when you’re doing it yourself.

1. You will start by registering a domain name, which should reflect what your site about. Keep it short, as long as it’s somehow related to your site. Being more specific can help. You could choose to name the page after one of your products or services, for example. Another method is to get a sub domain of a popular domain. This will generally help you get indexed more quickly though it will not appear quite as professional to your visitors. There is a trade of here, sub domains are quicker (and generally cheaper), but domain names are more memorable, and, in the long run, better for your indexing.

2. The next thing you should look at is your page’s title (i.e. the HTML title tag), which is critical in letting search engines see what the page is about, and is the first item looked at by search engines to determine your relevance. You should put your most important keywords in your title tags - you don’t need to worry about singular or plural forms as search engines account for these changes in most cases. Whatever you do, don’t call your home page ‘Home’ - make the title a mini-description of the page.

3. The two primary meta tags aren’t as important as they used to be, but the description tag is still used by some search engines to display information about your website to users and help them decide whether they’ve found what they are looking for. Not all search engines bother with this, though most will put some bearing on it (even if it is minuscule).

For very short descriptions the alt tag can be used. Alt tags let you describe an image or graphic file - they’re the pop-up descriptions that appear when you hover your mouse over a graphic, or when the graphic can’t be downloaded for whatever reason.

Text within comment tags is never displayed on the page - it is used by coders and designers to remind them of what that part of the page is for. Some coders used to put lots of keywords in the comment tags, so that they would be seen by search engines but not users, but search engines have now stopped paying attention to any text that isn’t seen by the user. Keep this in mind when trying to post invisible text (i.e. white text on a white background). This kind of behavior can get you banned from a search engine.

4. Having keyword density in all of your content is good, but keep in mind that each search engine has its own requirements when it comes to how many times that a keyword or phrase should be in the content for the page to be relevant. Somewhere between 5 and 8 percent is a roughly optimal level - but this isn’t always possible, and you shouldn’t force it. Don’t overdo it, or the search engines might mark you down.

5. Many search engines judge web page importance on the number and quality of incoming links from other sites. You should link to some related sites, but not too many. Don’t overdo incoming links either, and keep them related your site’s content. It’s also good to get sites to use your keywords as the text of these links.

If you follow the advice above, you can do it yourself and do fine. SEO, if done right, can keep you on top for as long as you want to be.

About The Author:

Lawrence Andrews is an ePublisher, software developer, consultant, and author of numerous books. Visit his Private Label Content and Software site at http://www.lmamedia.com for more information about
SEO and PRL.

You may use this article freely on your website as long as this resource box is included, a link point back to my site, and this article remains unchanged! Copyright 2005 Lawrence Andrews

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Off site SEO (search engines optimization) is as much important as on site SEO, so what is off site SEO?

Well off site SEO consist of a number of things from backlinks to PR’s (Press releases), first we will start with backlinks with what is a good thing and what is a bad thing here is a short list of the good and the bad off site SEO

Good

 1. Links placed of related subjects to your website.
 2. Links on high traffic websites.
 3. Links on high ranked websites in search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.
 4. Links on high PR (Google page rank) websites
 5. Text links not banners.
 

Now we will start with each one that is good off sites SEO and brake them down telling you the best way that this can and could be done, so starting with number one.

Links placed of related subjects to your website

This can be quite easy to do but this would depend on your website related subject, when looking for a website that is related to yours if you find some related websites you should also check to see if the website meats search engines requirements here are some good things that you should look out for

 1. Check to see if the website is up to date.
 2. Check to see if the website gets updated regally.
 3. Check to see if the website has the same related subjects on all or most of its website.
 4. Check to see if the website is high ranked in search engines like Google.
 5. Is the website getting much traffic?
 

So once you have checked all these things and you are happy with the website there are two things you can do, one is ask then can you pay for a link on there website, this can be good for one reason and that is the text link will be a one way link and this looks very natural to search engines but this can cost quite a lot on some websites, so you could take the other option and that is ask them if they are interested in a link exchange this means you would place a link on your website and they would place one on there website. It is some times best to make a links page and place there link on your website before you contact them, also show them the page that you have placed a link on from your website to there’s this will give you more of a chance in them saying yes to your offer.

Remember the page you have made for adding links, well the page should have a title of something like sponsors or resources you would be better not having something like links for the title. An ideal backlink on another websites would be if the owner of the website let you fully write a page that contains a full description and your keywords with approximately 300-400 words then on the same page two text links to your website, but this is very hard to get hold of if you can get your hands on owners that will let you do this then that would be the best backlink you could ever have.

This next bit covers sections 2, 3, and 4in the things to do that are good. A web site that very high traffic is most likely to be ranking quite high in search engines for some of there search terms, the reason it is good to get your backlink on a website like this is because there website is more than likely classed as a important website so robots would spider this site quite often if your link is on there website this would been your site will get spiders more often, now for the PR (Google page rank) with PR it starts from 0 to 10 and the 10 is being the best so placing your link on a low page rank will be good but not as good as placing it on a website with a PR7 or higher and a bit lower, the reason this is good is because websites like this with high PR wouldn’t rely place lots of links on there site and when they do search engines think that these must be important websites as well.

So why text links and not banners?

Well this is easy for some good reasons text links do a better job for your website than a banner because search engines will spider your website from these and you can place your keywords within the text of the link this is great for helping your rank higher in search engines here is a little example of this

Go to google and type in the search term click here you will see that the website ranking first is Adobe, the reason for this is because people that offer file downloads on there website that may need Adobe to read these files also offer a link to the Adobe website and they most on the times write this

To download Adobe click here

The click here is the link so remember place your keywords in your links. The reason I say banners are not much use is because they are mainly used for traffic to your website and that is it, so if you concentrate on the other off site SEO then you will get the traffic in the end.

Here is a list of the bad of site SEO

Bad

1. Try not to place a link on un related websites, this will not really be as much as a bad thing but it will not help you get any were better so it’s a waste of time.

2. Don’t place links on your website from a website that is band or black listed in google, the reason for this is that they will pull you down with them as google will look at your website being bad as well. Always check to see if the website is doing anything search engines illegal on there site and don’t worry it is ok to have your link on bad sites jut not there link you your website.

3. don’t place links on other websites to fast doing maybe 10 a day is good as this would look very natural to the search engines, but placing links in the hundreds a day isn’t a very good thing and you could look like a spammer to the search engines, so this would make your website take longer to get higher ranks from all your hard work.

My name is Karl I love to help other people with there problems related to webmasters or computers I own a multi subject website that contains 6 forums for computer and webmaster resources, For more information, visit: http://www.mkpitstop.co.uk

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