Six Good Online Forums For Marketing

When creating a blog one important step to get traffic to your blog is to market it.  There are various ways that you can market your blog and one of the ways you can do this is through posting on forums.  You can create an account with particular forums and put a link back to your blog in your signature and slowly get traffic back to your blog through those backlinks.  Below are a list of a few sites you may want to try this out with.

• Digital Point Forum
• Yaro’s Internet Business Forum
• WebHostingTalk Forum
• WhyDoWork Forum
• Webmaster Forum
• Create Blog Forum

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Article Submission Strategy To Increase Traffic

One good way to increase traffic to your blog (that I mentioned before in aearlier blog post) is to submit your articles to article directories.   There are many different techniques on how you should submit your blog posts to article directories.  Back in the day when people were just learning about SEO (search engine optimization) it was well known that mass submitting your articles was the best way to go.  However nowadays mass submission of your articles is not as effective and you need other techniques to get the traffic you want for your blog.

Some people say to submit some articles to high quality article directories and then submit others to low quality article directories.  Other people say to submit the same article to multiple articles directories.  These are all theories that may work but below is what I believe is the best way to increase traffic to your blog and not get PENALIZED by Google for using this technique.

First of all I don’t believe you need to submit the same article to multiple article directories.  Your article will eventually indexed as long as you submit it to a quality article directory such as:

• EzineArticles.com
• Buzzle.com
• ArticleDashboard.com
• Amazines.com
• IdeaMarketers.com

Most of these article directories require that you signup but that is usually quite easy and you get accepted in a couple of days normally.  Once you have your article submitted to one of these top article directories you shouldn’t submit it to the other 4 or so top article directories.  What you should be doing is take your best articles and submit them evenly between all of these article directories.  Then what I would do with the other lower quality or shorter articles is to submit them to the top 25 QUALITY article directories (not including the ones above). By doing this you get the most effective technique that seems to work nowadays with search engines and you increase the amount of traffic you receive.

So test this technique out for yourself and see how much traffic you receive from these article directories.  I think you will be surprised that if you keep this up you will have plenty of quality traffic coming to your blog on a consistent basis.

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Google Does Not Penalize Duplicate Content

What is duplicate content?

The first question you may be asking is what is duplicate content?  Well duplicate content generally refers to a substantial block of content within or across multiple domains that either completely matches or is appreciably similar.  Most of the time this is not intended to be malicious in origin but there are other times when people are trying to manipulate search engines results so they duplicate content.

So what isn’t duplicate content?

Content that is written in Spanish and also in English will not be considered as duplicate content.  As well if you have the occasional snippets (quotes and otherwise) this will not be considered as duplicate content either.

So why does Google care about duplicate content?

The reason why they care is because they want to provide to their users diverse content if possible.  They want a wide range of information so people get what they are looking for.  If people get duplicate results they will not be satisfied and neither will Google.  So Google tries to make the experience the best it can be for the users who use Google.

What does Google do about duplicate content?

Well there has been a myth for a long period of time going around that Google would completely ban your site and unindex it if you had duplicate content but this is not the case.  In reality what happens usually is the less desired result will fall in the index and not be ranked as highly as the desired results.  In rare cases some duplicate content will be removed from the index but this is the case when the content was made to manipulate Google rankings and deceive the users.  So if you aren’t trying to do this type of thing then having your content published in multiple locations on the internet is fine!

What can you do to proactively address duplicate content issue?

Well here are a few things you can try to have less duplicate content on the net:

• Block appropriately: you can block certain pages from being displayed in Googles index with a robots.txt file.  You can do this for duplicate pages such as a print version of a page that doesn’t need to be in Google’s index
• Be consistent with links: try to be consistent with your internal links. Don’t link to /page/ and /page and /page/index.htm
• Minimize repetition: For instance, instead of putting the copyright on the bottom of all your pages you could put a summary and have a link to the full copyright page
• Avoid publishing blank pages: if you are creating a page and it doesn’t have any content or does not have complete content then don’t publish it till it is finished.  This will help Google bots index only the pages it needs to
• Don’t fret: If there are people that are copying the content of your website you should be fine.  Don’t worry about them affecting the rank of your pages.  It may be annoying but will be highly unlikely to affect the rank of your site in a negative way

Have I used duplicated content?

Short answer. Yes!

I have duplicated a bunch of my content across websites.  Such as posting content in my blog and then publishing it in article directories and forums.  I usually wait a few weeks after I post it in my blog before I post it else where because I would like to get the original post indexed higher then the other pages but I think posting in more than one place is good.  It is good because it drives different types of traffic to your blog.  You do not want to rely on one type of traffic to support you website.  If you do and that one source for one reason or another disappears you will end up losing all of your traffic.

Summary

So to sum this all up.  Google will not penalize you for duplicate content as long as it is not done in a manipulative way that will deceive the users of Google.  It may lower the rank of some pages in the index compared to others but will not ban the pages completely.

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WordPress And SEO Techniques

The undersigned has a good article on optimizing your WordPress blog for search engines. It also has a collection of SEO articles from other sites including mine.

Some quick tips I would like to give you are

• select a permalink structure with the post title in it. Do not change your permalink structure once you have selected it as changing it will probably invalidate all of the links coming to you
• make sure that your post title comes before your blog name on your title
• Use keyword rich post titles
• use <h1> tags for your blog and post titles
• make proper use of alt tags. End them with a period (.)
• Use tags on your blog. I recommend Ultimate Tag Warrior.
• Use Related posts plugin which will help search engines to digg deeper into your blog
• Use Google Sitemap Generator to let Google know whenever you update your blog. Signup for Google’s Sitemap and add the sitemap that the plugin generated for you. Additionally, Elliot Kosmicki offers a script that will convert your Google sitemap into a Yahoo compliant sitemap that you can submit to Yahoo.
• Use Landing Sites to show related posts to visitors search on your blog

If you are interested in learning more about SEO I suggest you check out our SEO category for more details.

Source: Johntp.com

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8 Simple SEO Tips For Your Blog

Follow these simple rules for search engine optimization and your blog will rank much higher in Search Engines.

1. Use your primary keyword in your blog domain
   The first thing to do is to ensure that your blogs URL contains the primary keyword you want to optimize for. Using the targeted keyword in subdomains also helps. (unfortunately not something I’ve done with my blog)For example, if you want to start a HTML tutorial site then the primary keyword you want your URL to contain is html. So choose a URL like www.htmlhelp.com.
   You can also use the keyword in subdomains like www.web-design.com/htmlhelp
2. Use your primary keyphrase in the title of your posts
   If your primary key phrase is html help make sure that the word html and help appear in your blog headers such as H1 and H2 tags as well as the title of each of your posts.
3. Use your secondary keywords in the body of your post
   If you want to get listed for secondary keywords use them infrequently in the body of your post. The theory is that the more times a keyword appears within a Webpage, the more relevant the page is likely to be for someone searching those keywords.But do not overdo this by repeating the same keywords over and over again. Google bots can find out if a keyword is too frequent on a page and might just remove your site from their index.
4. Use your keywords in the anchor text of links
   Use your primary and secondary keywords in the anchor text of links when linking to other blog posts or to other pages of your blog. Keyword in links have more importance than simple text.
5. Make sure search engines can spider your blog easily
   Make sure your navigation bar is present on all pages of your blog. Your previous posts or atleast the popular ones should be linked to all pages so they get spidered easily.
6. Get backlinks from other blogs
   You need as many links as possible to link back to your posts or blog because it will help you build pagerank and get your blog to rank higher in search engines. The more links you have the higher your blog is ranked in Technorati helping your blog to be found easily.So how do you get backlinks?
   • The first thing to do to get high-quality links is to submit your blog and RSS feed to blog search engines and directories.Start by submitting your blog to all the directories listed on this page:
     http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/
   • Link exchanging with other similarly-themed blogs will help you to form richly interlinked networks or communities.
   • If you find an interesting article on another blog, link to it generously. The trackback will become a link back to your blog.
   • Lastly posting legitimate comments in response to posts on other blogs will help you get backlinks. Regularly post legitimate comments in similarly-themed blogs with high traffic to get many backlinks.
7. Update your blog frequently
   Update your blog frequently using all the rules mentioned above and your blog will surely get top rankings in a short time.
8. Stick with your blog
   Once you start posting on your blog, stick with the same domain or you could end up losing a lot of your traffic and regular readers.Also stick with the topic you selected for your blog. If it’s about pets don’t suddenly switch to another topic such as Gadget’s because you will loose traffic.

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