What would you do if you get all the learning you always wanted along with a sense of community to it all? How about asking questions and getting your doubts cleared while you are learning? It isn’t some e-course I am talking about, although e-courses are good too. E-courses usually have one or two facilitators which might make these courses rather biased and one-sided.

Think about SEO — an important topic you should master if you need tons of organic traffic to your websites. Learning about SEO is more effective when you get more than one perspective on each of the various concepts. This is made possible by forums. Just any forum won’t do — you got to head to some of the best places possible to give an edge to your learning. Here are some of the best forums you could go to:

Search Engine Watch Forums:

Search Engine Watch has always been the authority site when it comes to everything about search engines and theirs are an extension of the incredible value being provided. As if all the information on the main site isn’t enough, you have experts revealing information in the forums that could have been easily packaged and sold. If you want to learn SEO, this is one of the best places to hang out.

SearchGuild:

Usually forums discussing an ever-changing, dynamic and rather tricky science form like SEO could be a little uptight with little tolerance for stupid newbie questions, laziness and other such sore points associated with non-achievers or new comers. Some forums however, are great at making newbies feel comfortable. Searchguild, is one such forum which does this very well. Searchguild enables you to learn and interact in a casual and laid back style. They won’t tolerate trashing or spam though.

V7N Web Dev Forums:

John Scott is the founder of these forums and he is well-known to turn tables around and meander a little off the norms. Aaron Wall, the noted expert on SEO and author, also swears by this forum. You will also be surprised to know that he moderates all the forums mentioned here.

Nothing feels as food as a rush of traffic straight from organic searches off the search engines and that explains why SEO is such a heady thing. However, don’t let anyone tell you that they are SEO experts because they aren’t done with the learning yet — they never can. Search engines change algorithms all too often and hence SEO is now probably even more complex than what it should be. Can you be an expert on WordPress SEO, for instance?what can you as a blogger do?

Understand that blogs are an excellent medium and naturally turned into SEO. There are some tweaks to be done and a lot of that information is available online. However,

• Pick a niche — as narrow as possible: It has been said over and over again now and I am already feeling sick writing thisagain, but it is extremely important to pick a niche and stick to it. While it won’t make sense to go for something so obscure that no one wants to read about, it would be great to pick a sub-niche through a niche that is already very popular. For instance, have a review site/blog about all things web-based. Have a blog on cloud computing alone. Perhaps you would want to have a website on one or two specific health conditions. You get the drift, don’t you?
• It isn’t easy, so don’t kid yourself: It might take a long time for you to get this thing working for you. On top of that, it is a constantly changing science. This journey of thousand miles isn’t going to be easy, you are going to be learning on your way and you will look for every reason to stop learning because it is comfortable doing so. The rewards after successful learning, however, make up for all the trouble you might take. So keep at it.
• Put up blogs, tweak, and learn: One of the best ways to learn how to optimize your blog for Search Engines is to try to work on one or two of your blogs and see that they they rank well for particular keywords pertaining to your niche as discussed above. The way the niche should be chosen is that almost all of the content on your site should rest on just a couple of primary and secondary keywords. Do the meta description, add tags, use those amazing SEO plugins for wordpress and it shouldn’t be too difficult to get there.

Whoever coined the term ‘Free lunch’ must be having the last laugh at the cost of those who believe it. It is a misnomer and a myth. In the same way SEO is a term, which is often considered an abracadabra to high page ranking.You must not forget that there are no shortcuts to success. Do not for a moment believe the inflated or exaggerated claims to success by these companies. It is better to be realistic and aware and follow the right procedures or there is danger of your website being banned.

Three most common SEO myths are debunked below:

Meta tags are a must:

‘Meta tags will make or mar the website’. This is what is generally believed. Many people fail to realize that Meta tags actually do not matter. Initially, they were meant to assist webmasters and search engines and were crucial for web ranking. It became ineffective the moment people started integrating useless keywords in the title in the mistaken belief that this would improve ranking. You can’t fool search engines, at least for long. This does not mean that Meta tags are useless. The search engines will use the smartly written Meta tags to display your site in the SERPS and bring in extra visitors but they have a negligible effect on the ranking.

Multiple domains with Links pointing to each other

The more the merrier seems to be the myth. It is believed that multiple domains will bring in more traffic to your business. Nothing could be more false. Fifteen domains does not in any way guarantee fifteen times the traffic. In such a case one does not realize that one is putting in a lot of hard work which if put into one domain would be more effective. More often than not these sites, which have similar names, are declared mirror sites by the search engines and are not picked up at all. Apart from this, consider the effort, expense, management and time involved in maintaining these domains — a dangerous strategy fraught with loopholes, which brings in marginal results.

SEO is too costly.

This is what companies feel as the cost appears to be more than what radio ads, mailers and print ads seem to cost. What most people forget is that any promotional program is judged by the ROI (return on investment). An efficient, professional. Cost effective SEO program can raise the targeted traffic by anything between  45% to 85%. What is significant is that SEO brings in quality and targeted traffic from major search engines and not casual, disinterested traffic. The cost involved when compared to the results is negligible.

SEO is a tool which can work wonders if you are aware of the nuances of search engine working.

We have been talking plenty about how to install your wordpress blog on your domain through your hosting account, how to select a theme and upload it to your server and also a little about content and link-baiting. It is time to tweak your blog for some organic search juice. WordPress SEO is a tad different from tweaking normal websites for Search Engine Optimization. However, most of the fundamentals still remain. Here is a quick-start for your wordpress SEO:

1. Those permalinks need changing: After you log into your wordpress admin, head over to the tab to the left that says “settings”, click on permalinks and you find options for your permalinks like

Default: http://www.yourblogname.com/?p=123

Day and Name: http://www.yourblogname.com/2009/06/11/sample-post

Month and Name: http://www.yourblogname.com/2009/06/sample-post

Numeric: http://www.yourblogname.com/archives/123

Custom Structure

All you have to do is to go to “custom Structure” and type in /%postname%/. Click on save and you are done.

2. Submit to MSN: It is incredibly easy to list your site on MSN. Just go to http://www.msn.com and type your blog name on the search bar on the top. If it is a new blog, you are most likely not going t find it listed when hit the search button. Instead go this page and submit your link to MSN. Press submit.

3. Research before posting: You may want to write about anything related to niche on your blog but choose your titles carefully. It has to be catchy enough to invoke enough interest from your readers, but it should also be able to gather some search traffic for you. The best tool for this would be the Google Adword keyword Suggestion Tool. Type your relevant keyword in the search and Google will suggest tons of keywords with respective number of searches for each, per month average. Use that to get the right keywords into your titles.

4. Add Tags and Categories: Search engines like Technorati operates mostly on tag based search and tags, along with categories also add a lot of weight to get some search engine traffic for you. For each post, pick up the highly targeted keywords and fill up the add tags option without fail. Think of it as a fishing net: the more tags you add the wider you cast the net.

Google’s PageRank (PR) is one of the most sought after web page attributes. The original idea was that a link from a web page to other site’s web page was basically a vote for that page. Google then used the number of inbound links (IBL or more often called backlinks) to a page to decide its importance. Based on this calculation (however there are many other factors, too) Google ranked the page and decided where it should appear in the search engine results (SERP).

Google uses scale of measurement for PageRank from 1 to 10. The lowest possible PR is PR1, the highest is PR10. The new websites tend to have PR0 which essentially means that they are indexed but they have no PR yet. Here is the official Google’s explanation of the PR.

The table above is only for a better imagination of how the the PageRank is calculated. Only Google knows the exact formula though. When building backlinks for your website remember that quality is more important than quantity. Try to get few higher PR links instead of bunch of low ones. In addition, you must be patient. Google updates the PR averagely every two months (the longest documented period of time between two PR updates was 122 days).

Factors that can increase your Google PageRank

• Update Pages Frequently 2/10

• Add Pages Frequently 4/10

• Good Neighborhood Directories with high PageRank Levels 7/10

• Monster Websites 7/10

• Quality Inbound links 8/10

• Quality Relevant Links 9/10

• No Broken Links 5/10

• Article Submissions (this can increase your PageRank by getting more inbound links)

• All these put together 10/10

Factors that can decrease your Google PageRank

• Bad inbound links such as Poker, Porn, Sex, Drugs, or anything to that nature

• Link spamming

• Bad Content

• Lots of broken links

• SEO Black Hat Techniques

Google PageRank Formula

The thing is that nobody actually knows how the PageRank is calculated (except Google of course) but webmasters have discovered over the time the possible algorhitm that seems to fit into equations:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn))

More simple way of thinking about it:

a page’s PageRank = 0.15 + 0.85 * (a “share” of the PageRank of every page that links to it)

“Share” is the linking pages’ PageRank divided by the number of outbound links.

Do you know the difference between PageRank, TrustRank, and link equity? Want to know what a canonical URL is?  The SEO Book is one of the most widely read search engine optimization. SEOBook.com is a leading SEO blog by Aaron Wall covering the search space. It offers marketing tips, search analysis, and whatever random rants come to mind. The first version of this very popular SEO Book came out in December of 2003. It has probably been revised it about 50 times since then. It has 220+ pages and I would recommend it to anyone involved in Search marketing, from absolute beginner to seasoned veteran. The SEO Book takes you right through the vast spectrum of techniques, tools, theories and history of Search marketing.

Keywords, keywords, keywords. Yep, it’s all about those keywords, and this chapters primary focus is just that. We start off with some general admonishments to focus on specifics, and leave generics well alone. Swiftly moving into targeted Search phrases, the book walks you through keyword conversions, the keyword pyramid, and keyword research — with a great list of keyword tools and services.

Keyword suggestion tools and discovery techniques are an essential part of any seo’s toolkit. There are good explanations of such tools as Wordtracker, Google Suggest, Overture Keyword Suggestion and Google Keyword Sandbox, as well as a whole list of lesser known but powerful research tools.

Keyword competition was a great section for me, as many of the tools cited were known to me, but not necessarily bookmarked, and some of the techniques for judging the competitiveness of a keyword/phrase were very new, or long forgotten — This particular section i’ll most likely come back to time and time again, not to mention finally sorting out my outdated keyword tools bookmarks. Smashing stuff.

Meta tags, along with page title’s takes us right back to SEO 101, the take home here comes from the large section on page titles where the focus shifts to ROI.

Optimizing page copy as you would expect is de-emphasized as an important part of SEO in this next section. The focus instead, tunes to page structure and good use of headings, and other HTML elements as well as how to smoothly integrate keywords naturally into a page.

Content building concludes the chapter, with a strong statement on how junk content will only damage most websites. The list of ways to find quality free content however, is superb, with ideas for finding both cheap premade content, cheap custom written copy and more premium freelance hire.

While some chapters are lighter than others, every one is packed with detail, with an interactive section at the end of each for quick reference to tools and sites mentioned in the book. It is one of the Top books on SEO and has gotten much praise for its easy and simplified approach to search engine optimization.  I highly recommend it, you will not be disappointed.

SEOBook.com