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SEO And Advertising Techniques

Search engines are for a lot of websites the primary source of traffic. And every webmaster wants to make sure that their websites appear in the first results that google (or any other search engine) gives when a person is looking for a specific keyword.
To accomplish this there are certain SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques that can be used.
Keyword density, keywords in the header and title tags, good description and keyword meta tags and many other tricks.

Forums however are a bit harder to optimize because you've got no real control over the content of the pages. Without any mods or changes the meta tags are often the same for all pages (and most of the time even unrelated to the topic of your site), hardly (or no) header tags with keywords, no alt text for images and so on.

But you shouldn't only focus on the search engines as your source of traffic. You can also use other advertising techniques for forums, and often there is also a chance that it'll improve your rankings as well. Submitting your site/forum to directories probably won't give you any visitors, but it's a great way to get more backlinks. You can also buy advertising space on other sites or do link and banner exchanges If they have a high PageRank, it'll be another benefit. It's better to have a few links from high PageRank sites, then from lots of sites with a low PageRank or no PageRank at all.

You can find more tips about optimizing forums in our "Search Engines, SEO, advertising techniques and traffic building" forum .

If you've got any questions related to SEO, search engines, directories, or if you need help to advertise your forum or website then feel free to sign up and ask your questions on the forum!

- Harro
Forum Affiliates Network Admin

yahoo vs msn vs google

Yahoo!

* been in the search game for many years.
* is better than MSN but nowhere near as good as Google at determining if a link is a natural citation or not.
* has a ton of internal content and a paid inclusion program. both of which give them incentive to bias search results toward commercial results
* things like cheesy off topic reciprocal links still work great in Yahoo!

MSN Search

* new to the search game
* is bad at determining if a link is natural or artificial in nature
* due to sucking at link analysis they place too much weight on the page content
* their poor relevancy algorithms cause a heavy bias toward commercial results
* likes bursty recent links
* new sites that are generally untrusted in other systems can rank quickly in MSN Search
* things like cheesy off topic reciprocal links still work great in MSN Search

Google

* has been in the search game a long time, and saw the web graph when it is much cleaner than the current web graph
* is much better than the other engines at determining if a link is a true editorial citation or an artificial link
* looks for natural link growth over time
* heavily biases search results toward informational resources
* trusts old sites way too much
* a page on a site or subdomain of a site with significant age or link related trust can rank much better than it should, even with no external citations
* they have aggressive duplicate content filters that filter out many pages with similar content
* if a page is obviously focused on a term they may filter the document out for that term. on page variation and link anchor text variation are important. a page with a single reference or a few references of a modifier will frequently outrank pages that are heavily focused on a search phrase containing that modifier
* crawl depth determined not only by link quantity, but also link quality. Excessive low quality links may make your site less likely to be crawled deep or even included in the index.
* things like cheesy off topic reciprocal links are generally ineffective in Google when you consider the associated opportunity cost

Author: suleka
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