Organic SEO and Website Promotion – What The Forums Are telling Us

As you probably know already, commenting on relevant blogs and forums is a good way to get quality backlinks to your webpages. It is a valuable part of website promotion. So, to improve and encourage my organic SEO, I make regular visits to those serving my main niche, Internet Marketing.

Over time I have come to see a pattern, both for those seeking answers to their problems and concerns, and for others willing to share their knowledge and experience of SEO best practices. I thought that it might interest my fellow Hubbers to take a look at some of these patterns, particularly those who might have a few years’ marketing wisdom under their belts.

It might even stimulate some new Hubs concerned with search engine optimization tips and advice!

By far and away the most vexing question is about creating and increasing backlinks.

What are quality links? What is a link pyramid? How many links are enough? What is the best way to build genuine links? Automated or manual?

You get the picture.

Most answers favour taking the time and doing the job properly. Automatic link creators, link farms, manipulative link exchanging and link buying all get a bad press.

The problem, as I see it, is that newbies want and expect instant results, either because they are short of money or because they have been misled by the ‘instant millionaire’ gurus. They do not realise that organic search engine optimization takes time to see results.

Recently I read one newbie’s moan that he already had 12,000 links (!) to his site but that Google was still putting his page (note the singular) back in page 8 of its search results for his ‘low competition’ keyword. This sort of post is not untypical.

Closely allied with backlinks, of course, is the question of how to increase traffic to one’s site. This embraces not only the general subject of good SEO practices but also specific concerns about Google PageRank, Alexa rank, whether Do Follow blogs are worthwhile, PPC or SEO, and what constitutes relevant traffic for online SEO.

I am glad to say that, in general, consistent advice is to concentrate on doing proper optimization and building good backlinks, and to forget about all the rest. PageRank, for instance – just a warm fuzzy feeling generator that does nothing to improve conversions. Amen to that.

A popular subject, understandably, but still not as much as links and traffic. Keyword density, how many keyword phrases to target, even the significance of keywords!

Most people seem to have a good basic grasp of keywords and their place at the heart of any online SEO, but opinions differ about how to find them, use them and test them. As many thought that one keyword per webpage was the rule as thought that you should swamp the page with as many keywords as you like.

Now I’m not too sure myself!

I am glad to say that, overwhelmingly, the advice is to concentrate on writing good, useful content and to avoid automatic article writing gimmicks. Google Panda looms large as a threat to newbies, even though those with more experience see it as having had a mostly positive effect on website quality.

How many words minimum? Some say 400, most say 500 or more. But avoid padding out content just to get the numbers (Big Brother Google will always spot this!).

The message, however, is now loud and clear – quality over quantity every time.

Of course, site SEO is a perennial topic, even if many of us might think it has been done to death. It is easy to forget that newbies keep coming (thank goodness) and do not always know where to go for guidance and advice.

The forums are full of on-page SEO tips for beginners, most of it as far as I can see being pretty sound advice. The importance of relevant titles with the primary keyword prominently included, also heading tags, keywords in all the usual places, even LSI (Latent Semantic Index, for those who care – and I am one of them).

Even though there is a ton of internet marketing SEO information out there, it still seems to be out of reach for many beginners. I know from my own experience, several years ago, when I had to swim about for quite a long time on my own before I finally stumbled on the guidance and training that put me on the right path. Food for thought.

There is plenty of technical stuff, of course, on such diverse issues as RSS feeds, page loading speeds, SEO tools and software, sitemaps, plug-ins, how to measure traffic (Google Analytics gets a good press, justifiably), all that sort of thing.

Not much to say, here, other than that there is clearly expert technical support for pretty much every problem or concern.

The great thing about these forums is the wealth of eager and informed members who genuinely want to help and encourage those who want to improve their internet marketing knowledge and skills. Yes, the same topics seem to go round and round, but there is good reason for that.

There are loads and loads of people out there who need guidance and help in their quest for better organic SEO. I find this both sobering and exciting. Sobering, because I can so easily take for granted all the help and advice given so freely to me, and that has been pivotal in my own success in this business.

Exciting, because it offers so much opportunity to think of new ways to help and guide those people trying to develop their own businesses online. And to possibly make a little money on the way!