A factor which is consistently over looked in forums is SEO. As a result forums often don’t rank well, if at all, and are commonly indexed less often than blogs or websites. By applying some simple SEO functions to your forums you can drastically increase the traffic it receives from search engines and it’s exposure in general.

1. Pretty Permalinks

Permalinks is a term more often used in blogging than forums, but the concept is exactly the same. By default a thread in your forum may have a URL that looks something like http://www.yoursite.com/forums/index.php?topic=13&post=4495. For search engines, the URL, especially the very last part, is important and helps your ranking a good deal. By modifying your permalinks you can have something like http://www.yoursite.com/forums/seo/how-to-get-ranked-quickly which looks a lot better to visitors and search engines alike, and gives you some extra juice when someone links to you too.

phpBB SEO – http://www.phpbb-seo.com – offers a variety of tools and mods for phpBB which enable custom permalinks. They also have a community based around optimizing phpBB which offers alot of great information.

2. Use a little nofollow

Nofollow is a new (introduced in 2005) attribute which can be applied to hyperlinks like this: <a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.seanbluestone.com”>SeanBluestone.com</a>. Any link with this attribute will be ignored by most major search engines, they will not spider or index the link (with the exception of Ask.com and Yahoo!). This is very useful when using SEO for Google because any links from your forums or website which aren’t useful or don’t need to be ranked can have the nofollow attribute applied to them. Your About and Contact Us pages, for example, do they really need to be indexed and ranking for keywords? No! By applying nofollow to links which don’t matter as much, Google gives more weight to links which do follow.

For example, if your main page is PR 6 and you have 10 links from that page, each one, as an example, might be worth 0.6 PR (PR 6 / 10 Links = 0.6). If you deem that 5 of those links don’t need to be indexed and apply nofollow, each of your links then becomes worth 1.2 PR each (Pr 6 / 5 Links = 1.2). This is a simplified example and it doesn’t work quite like this in real life, but using the simple nofollow tag you can give a bit of extra worth to links you like and take value away from those you dont.

When looked at from a Forum perspective, there are many links on every page which are useless. The Login and Register links for example, are worthless. So too are the FAQ & Search links, and many more. If you display a list of users who are online or who recently registered, you can sometimes have tens or even hundreds of worthless links which are all getting juice from your forum index. Apply nofollow to these and you greatly increase the worth of your topic and other links on the index.

If you have a look around your forums, being sure to log out (since this is how Search Engines see your forum) I’m sure you can find plenty of unnecessary links which could be nofollow.

NoDoFollow – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5687 – Is a plugin for Firefox which highlights nofollow links and allows you to see at a glance your link distribution on any page.

3. Titles & Meta Data

As standard most of the major forum packages don’t include META data for your threads and topics. While Meta Data isn’t as important as it used to be, many of the top search engines still use it. Yahoo! still pays attention to meta keywords, though doesn’t give it much data, and most search engines use meta description to display some information about a page in their search results. By placing the first few sentences of the thread in the description you give just a little more SEO.

By contrast they include too much information in the title tag, usually in the format of Forum Name – View Topic – Thread Title. This is a waste and clogs up the title which should ideally be 8 to 10 words long. Google in specific, loves the title tag. It’s the single most important on page factor for any page. Instead, have the title of the thread as the only item in the title tag. If you really want your forum or site name in there too, add it after the thread name like Thread Title – SiteName.com. This means that the thread title and topic is the most important thing for the search spiders and it’s more likely to rank well.

4. Use Header tags and Sort Out Your Layout

Most forum packages have terrible layouts as far as SEO is concerned. Usually the title will be standard text half way down the fold, after all the login options and other links. By making some minor changes like putting the title in an <h1> tag, moving the majority of the login options and other links to after the page, and pushing the avatar and user details to the right hand side, you greatly increase the on page SEO factors and value of the information on the page. Take out some of the unneeded data like the date of each reply, large quantities of user data, plethoras of image links, etc, and give back some value to the thread text itself.

5. Duplicate Links & Supplemental Pages

This is a very common problem with almost all forum software and stretches accross the board. The problem arises when you have two different links to the same thread or topic. For example one link from a topic might be http://www.seanbluestone.com/forum/index.php?t=7&thread=3422 while the ‘Most recent thread in this topic’ link might be http://www.seanbluestone.com/forum/index.php?topic=7&recent=3422 and the ‘Next Thread’ link from another thread might be http://www.seanbluestone.com/forum/index.php?topic=7&next=3422. These are 3 different links to the same page, yet search engines see them as 3 different pages with the same information. As a result all 3 may be placed in the supplemental index and not displayed. Solving this problem could be as simple as adding a few nofollow links.

Another problem is where two threads have the same title. This can happen alot in larger forums and causes problems in many search engines. It means that if 5 people start a thread on ‘How To Add AdSense To Your Forums’ then only 1 will be displayed on Google while the other 4 are seen as duplicate content. Solving this problem could be as simple as adding the date or page to the title.

VBSEO – http://www.vbseo.com – is an SEO package for vBulletin which offers solutions to the duplicate link problem as well as many other excellent features. It’s costly, at $150, but a worth while investment for the serious webmaster.

6. Offer RSS feeds and Social Bookmark links

With most mobile phones now offering web access and the vast array of hand held devices like palm pilots, RSS is becoming ever more commonplace. Several RSS search engines and directories exist and a whole industry revolves around it. Creating an RSS feed is extremely simple and plugins to do so exist for all of the major forum softwares. By offering RSS feeds for popular threads and topics you increase your exposure and likelyhood of getting return visitors. Since RSS is light and heavy server load is unlikely, you can safely offer RSS feeds for every thread on your forums by supplying a button at the top or bottom of each thread.

Similarly Social Bookmarking has exploded in recent years and is now one of the best methods for getting traffic. Again, all you need is a simple plugin and you can offer a button or series of buttons at the bottom of each thread to allow users to add the thread to popular Social Bookmark sites.

ShareThis – http://www.sharethis.com/getbutton – is a useful, free service that allows you to place a button anywhere on your site which lets your readers add you to their favorite Social Bookmark site.

Most forum packages have a section on their site for mods or plugins and a quick search will offer you solutions to most of the problems above. Usually getting your forums up to scratch on SEO only takes a matter of minutes and doing so will have huge repercussions in the long run. Take 5 minutes out of your schedule and give your forums a new lease of life.

You reap what you sow, and if you put in a good amount of hard work and effort, you will see results. This means taking the industry standard methods for link building and making a commitment to giving them a genuine shot. Yes, there are lots of unique quirky ways to generate links and some of them work well, but without starting from the ground up and using the methods that you know work because they’ve been done to death the internet over, you’ll run out of steam very quickly.

So, to answer the question “What are the best ways to generate incoming links?”, the answers are as follows. Those which I’ve provided tips and best practices for are linked.

Article Marketing – Writing articles on your websites topic and publishing them on sites like Ezinearticles.com. By including a link to your site in the bio box or About The Author section your article will generate an incoming link to your site with your anchor text each time someone publishes it on their site. Over time you will generate more links and while Google gives less weight to duplicate content these days, you can easily submit the same post a few times with the words and sentences changed enough to warrant a new article. The better your article is and the more directories you post it to, the more links you will receive.

Directory Submission – Submitting your articles to directory sites for a free link back. Again, Google weighs this less than it used to, but this is a free service and can be done a few hundred times in very little time. By changing the text slightly for each directory you submit to and spend 10 minutes each day submitting to 10 directories, you increase your exposure while staying in Googles good books.

Reciprocal Linking – Sending out comments and emails asking other websites in your niche or genre to link you back. Once again, Google doesn’t value reciprocal links as much as it used to but they are still worth something and by linking with sites with higher PR than your own you increase the worth of your site for free.

Create Consistent Good Quality Content – This is the fundamental core upon which link building exists. ‘If you build it they will come’ doesn’t just apply to Kevin Costner, it’s an absolute certainty on the internet. If you have good quality content people will automatically link to you without you taking any other action. If you have 1,000 articles and not one is good, you will receive no links and no exposure while by contrast if you have a single good article you will receive at least some interest and likely some incoming links. Every successful webmaster should spend time and effort on every article or web page he creates before trying other ways to market and expose that content.

Get Involved With The Community – Another method which crops up in almost every answer to the ‘How do I create incoming links’ question – posting comments on other blogs and questions and answers on forums. These touted methods still remain effective- including links to your site in well made and relevant comments on articles which relate to your site and doing the same or including your link in your signature on forums. As long as you’re providing useful content on these sites then you will see a trickle of traffic and more importantly a trickle of incoming links as a result.

Social Bookmarking – This method hasn’t been around for as long as the others but it’s now widely used and is definately an industry standard. Using a site like SocialMarker – http://www.socialmarker.com – you sign up for several Social Bookmark sites and submit some of your articles, taking a few minutes to give it an eye catching title. This is a very good method for new sites and blogs and can help you To Get Indexed On Google In Half An Hour.

There are rarely short cuts, and anyone offering a fast-track solution is usually out to make a buck. By spending a few hours or a few days on each of the conventional and recognized methods above you give yourself a bit of experience in the standard link building steps and are guarenteed to slowly elevate the rank and value of your site. Anything worth doing takes time and effort to do right, and the internet is no exception. By all means experiment with quirky new ideas and approaches to link building, but understand that they must be built on a bedrock of the accepted and proven ways.

First you need to collect a list of sites you’d like to reciprocate links with. The idea here is to find sites that have some PR and are also in your niche or category. To do this head over to Google and search for terms like “Add URL” + Link Building, “Submit Site” + Link Building, etc, replacing Link Building with your own niche. This will bring up a list of sites in your category which allow you to add your link, usually at the cost of a reciprocal link. Go through the list of sites and on a piece of paper or in a text file, keep a 3 columned list of the name of the site, the URL and the contact email address. Usually you can find the latter by having a quick look around the page for a Contact Us link or something similar.

The following terms are worth searching for to try and find reciprocal links, just add your niche after the term, i.e. “Add site” + Link Building. The double quotes ensure that that exact term is found. “Add site”, “Add your website”, “Submit URL”, “Submit your site”, “Suggest site”, “Suggest URL”, “Exchange links”, “Swap links”.
Another good method which will often return better results is to search for inurl: links.htm + Reciprocal Linking or inurl: linktous.html + SEO. You can try this with different extensions (.php, .shtml, etc) and see what you get.

Once you have a list of 50 or 60 sites you feel are worth getting a link from, you want to send out a quick email to all of them asking if they’ll add a link to your site. Here is a sample email you can send:

Dear webmaster,

I am the webmaster of [www.seanbluestone.com] and I'm sending this email to see if you're interested in trading links with me.

At [SeanBluestone.com] we [offer articles and resources on a wide range of topics including SEO, Self Improvement, Making Money Online] and more. We launched in [September 2008] and already hundreds of people interested in [self improvement and SEO] visit our site every day. We're currently at [Page Rank 4].

I feel that your site [www.targetsite.com] matches the content of my own and as such our visitors would find your site useful and vice versa.

If you are interested in swapping links please include the HTML link below on your links page and email me back with the anchor text and description you would like me to use and I'll add your link to [www.seanbluestone.com/links.htm] within 48 hours. This page also contains more information on how to link back to us though if you have any further questions or requests feel free to include them in a reply to this email.

<a href="http://www.seanbluestone.com">SeanBluestone.com</a> - Articles and resources on SEO, Self Improvement, Making Money Online and more.

Thanks for your time,

[Sean Bluestone

http://www.seanbluestone.com]

All parts which you will need to edit are included in square brackets. Simply edit these parts for your own site and personalize the email a bit, then send it out to each of the webmasters on your list. The more people you send it out to the better, because typically you’ll only receive a reply to 1 in 10 sites. For those sites which are more important and have a higher PR you might want to try again with a different more personalized email and include their link before you send your proposal.

Using these methods you can generally find a few hundred potential links and email them all within 20-25 minutes. This will save you a huge amount of time and even if you only get 10-15 links from it, you’ve spend nothing and gained alot. After you’ve exhausted all the sites on Google you can try Yahoo! which will typically give you twice to three times as many. Some people may have a problem with what they see as spam, but so long as you personalize the email a little and take the actions you specify in your email, you keep things professional and should have no problems.

A nice alternative or addition to this method is to use automated software to create a place where other webmasters can come to your site and add their link. The script then checks their site to make sure they have a reciprocal link and if so, adds them to your list. This has the advantage that you don’t need to email lots of people, they can come to you and create a reciprocal link without the need for a response. The disadvantage is that unless this page is indexed and ranking it’s unlikely they’ll find you. A couple of free options are My Link Helper – http://www.mylinkhelper.com – and PHP Link Directory – http://www.phplinkdirectory.com.

As an alternative you can try reciprocal link exchange directories. These are third party sites which are a haven for people looking for reciprocal links. Sites are normally grouped by category and you can usually narrow down results by other criteria. Two of the better ones are Build Reciprocal Links – http://www.build-reciprocal-links.com – and The Link Exchange Directory – http://www.link-exchange.ws – though there are plenty more out there.

Whichever methods you chose to implement reciprocal linking is very important for new sites and while not as powerful as it was in the early days of Google, I have seen many major, high ranking sites get where they are because their primary SEO strategy is reciprocal links.

Is submitting to directories still worth it?

This is a commonly seen question which often results in gritty arguments and length discussion. The short answer is yes, but only if you spend a bit of time getting it right. The majority of directories have almost no PR and are pretty worthless to Google and so submitting to them wont give you much value at all, if any, though may still warrant for something on other search engines. To get some real value from directories you must pick and chose the best of the best, the ones that give out some PR with their links.

The Heavy Weights – DMOZ and Yahoo! Directory

The two undisputed heavy weights of the directory world are Yahoo! Directory and DMOZ.org. Both are maintained by human beings who spend their time to accepting and refusing sites from their specific category. As such they don’t accept just anyone and getting in can be tricky.

Yahoo! Directory costs $300 to apply for, and that fee doesn’t guarantee you a listing. There are a large number of high PR directories out there and several of them are free so paying the $300 for Yahoo! shouldn’t be your first step, but if you can afford it it’s definitely worth it.

DMOZ is an open directory run by volunteers from all over the world. It’s free to get a listing in and is probably even more important than Yahoo! directory since it’s used in the ranking algorithms of many of the smaller search engines.

Be absolutely certain that you’re picking the right category for your site. Each category has a description, read it and make sure it applies to your site before submitting. If you chose the wrong category then what will happen is you’ll wait 3 or 4 weeks until an editor reads your submission. If it isn’t in the right category he’ll forward it up, down or across the line to another category and into another 3 to 4 week queue before someone else looks at it. By being diligent in your selection of category you increase your chances of getting in and decrease the time taken to review your entry.

Do NOT use anchor text in your title or a promotional, hyped description. Many people try to give themselves more clicks and better rank by using, for example, the title “Get Better SEO With High-Tech SEO Ltd” when a more appropriate title would be “High-Tech SEO Ltd”. If you’re extremely lucky you can get away with a little bit of hype, but 9 times out of 10 the editor will simply change your title and description to their own and they will usually read pretty lamely with no emotion at all. Even more likely, a busy editor will simply skip your entry or bump you to the back of the queue.

Become an Editor?

Becoming an editor for DMOZ is a positive step and can help you get your site get listed and have a good position, title and description. You should NOT join DMOZ solely for this reason however, not because it’s immoral or unethical, but because it’s a waste of time. If your site is in a popular niche like SEO or Internet Marketing then you will have to edit for a few years, and do a good job of it, before you’re considered for a position in this category. This article takes a look at becoming a DMOZ editor and gives an idea of the amount of work involved. This time and effort would be much better spend simply making good content for your site and making a good submission to DMOZ.

Other than the two main directories there are a plethora of others which are held in high regard by most search engines and can bring you some nice PR. Here is a list of directories by PR.

The exception to the PR rule is when you find a directory in your niche or one that relates specifically to your genre. Directories which specialize in one area tend to be less spammy and are respected a bit more by Google. You can find plenty of category specific directories by searching Google for terms like “Add URL” + Link Building or “Submit Site” + SEO, replacing Link Building and SEO with your subject.

Speed Up Submission

There are a number of software packages which can help you speed up the process of submitting to directories. They ask you to supply the details of your site (name, URL, category, description, etc) and with the press of a button can add you to several hundred sites in minutes. One thing to note is to be careful with how many links you generate each day, since Google pays attention to how fast sites gain new links and can hammer down on you.

Here are some of the free options available. I’ve chosen to exclude paid packages because I don’t think that this service is worth paying for.

Directory Submitter – http://directorysubmitter.imwishlist.com
Submit Helper – http://www.submithelper.com/User/User_Download.aspx?ProductID=3
SliQ Submitter – http://www.sliqtools.co.uk/directory-submission-tool.aspx

Writing isn’t for everyone, but if you’re trying out article marketing then you’re probably already a good, at least reasonably good, writer. With that said, everyone could use a refresher course every now and then and there are always new techniques you can learn and apply to your article writing. Check out this article on better writing and see the difference between professional and amateur writing.

Get the most out of the Bio Box

Your bio box, aka the resource or author box, is in some ways the most important part of your article. It is the reason for the article to exist: a link back to your site. You should mix your bio box up regularly and link to different sections of your site dependent on what the article is about. This can be effectively used for deeplinking and giving PR to pages you want to be ranked a bit higher. To get the most out of your bio box you must understand the reason a person is reading your article in the first place: to get information and to find out about the topic you’ve written about. Therefor if you’re article is good and you offer them more information on the same topic then they will be more likely to click your link. Be specific, offer a link to an article very closely related to the one they just read. Another method which is pretty successful is to offer something for free, an ebook, audio course, set of videos or anything interesting you have that’s related to your niche. Be creative and original and you greatly increase your exposure and traffic.

Article Spinning – Clone Your Article

Article spinning is where you use a piece of software to rewrite your article, changing common phrases and words for others using a thesaurus. This is a very important step because you can turn 1 article into 5 and submit to 5 different article directories without being penalized by Google for duplicate content. Article spinning isn’t perfect and you will need to spend a few minutes after processing an article to clear out any obvious faults (grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, etc). The catch 22 though, is that if you spend any more than 5 or 10 minutes tidying up the article then you’d be as well spending that time on writing a completely new article. However, you can still get good results and if you’re submitting to large numbers of directories then you can get good results.

Here are a couple of free article spinning packages. As always I have chosen not to include paid options.

Jet Spinner – http://www.jetsubmitter.com – Requires you to sign up and supply an email address.
WordFlood 2.0 – http://www.wordflood.com – The 14 day free trial should cover most of your needs.

Maximum Exposure – Submit to a Number of Sites

The final step is to submit your articles and another piece of software can help you vastly increase your effectiveness here. Directory submitters allow you to input the elements of your article, the title, resource box, article itself, etc, and supply your login information. It then submits en masse to as many sites as you select. This cuts down the time and effort you need to put in and increases your exposure several times over.

Some people worry about being hammered into Googles supplemental index for duplicate content and avoid this practice, but you should understand how the supplemental index works and that while having duplicate content isn’t as good as having original content, it’s still worth something. Since you aren’t paying for these articles then there’s no harm.

Here are three of the free software packages for doing this. I’ve chosen not to include the paid packages because I don’t feel paying for something like this is worth the expense.

Magic Article Submitter – http://www.jasonoickle.com/article-submitter
Article Sender – http://www.articlesender.com
Article Submitter – http://articlesubmitter.imwishlist.com

Once you understand how Google spiders/crawlers work, you can get yourself indexed and have your pages included in search results in the same day, sometimes within the same hour. So, just how do Google crawlers work? Well, in the olden days it used to be that at a set time every month Google would initiate its spiders and search for new sites, as well as update existing sites in its database. This was known as the Google dance and often saw large hops and drops in page rank for many sites. Eventually the Google dance became extinct and the spiders of today are constantly operational.

If you perform a search for a topic in Google there are 3 links next to the URL: Cached, Similar Pages & Note This. The Cached button shows you the last snapshot of the website Google took, along with the time and date. Now, if a website updates its content roughly every week, the spider will eventually learn this and, to optimize, will visit the site roughly once a week. Similarly if a website has new content every hour, the spider will learn this pattern and visit the site every hour or so. This means that popular websites like Digg and StumbleUpon are spidered several times per day, usually every half hour or so. Therefor, if you have a link on a major page of one of these sites, your link will be followed and your site will be indexed. The great thing about the sites mentioned is that they’re Social Bookmark sites and allow anyone to add links to anywhere. While getting on the front page isn’t really plausable, you can probably put together a quick link that will get onto one of the category pages, and those are spidered just as regularly