Archive for April, 2009

Why Using Forums is Good for Site Traffic and SEO

I thought I would make a quick post about the benefits of attaching a forum to your site. Now this most likely applies to large ecommerce sites however it is still worth noting as forums can prove to be very effective in search engine optimisation (SEO).

Have a think about a consumers or even your own search behaviour. Very seldom when we are after a certain product do we search for it in a search engine, go through to a site and then buy it (okay this sometimes does happen especially with sites like Amazon). What I tend to do is research into products I am after and more often than not this research takes me to communities within the World Wide Web. Now this is one half of why having a forum for your site is a good idea.

Canonicalization and SEO

I am currently building up a glossary of terms for the Blueclaw site which I hope to put live soon and was inspired to write a post on canonicalization. Unfortunately I am still trying to come up with a good definition for it so I will stick with the definition of Matt Cutts:

“the process of picking the best URL when there are several choices…”

Niche Specific Content

Recently we have been focussing heavily upon the importance of content on your website. It is always useful to bear in mind that the search engines can only read text so even if your website has relevant pictures, logos and colour schemes, whilst they may be pleasing to the eye they will do nothing to aid your search engine rankings. Alt tags can show the search engines what keywords your pictures are relevant for, however, paragraphs of text are paramount for the success of your website on the search engines. We have already seen how to write content for your site in a recent post but here I shall focus on the importance of nice specific content.

Google Local Searches

A common problem that small businesses often face is that they don’t have the budget required to pursue an SEO campaign that targets generic terms such as restaurants or florists due to the high traffic volumes associated with these keywords and hence the high competition that naturally follows.

In order to get the most out of a small budget it is often the case that long tail keyphrases are targeted. Whilst these phrases have significantly less search engine traffic, the right phrases can be profitable due to high relevancy, which as a result, increases the chance of converting a prospect into a customer. Long tail keyphrases should always be targeted wherever possible due to this increased relevancy from the initial search to your product or service, however, due to a recent Google development it may be possible for small businesses to benefit from generic search phrases without having to set aside a huge budget for SEO.

The key to writing SEO content for your site

I have written a post on how to write good articles for SEO however staying on the subject of writing I thought it would be good idea to talk about writing for the web. It’s become a bit of cliché in the SEO world but content is king so if you are serious about getting your site recognised for a keyword then you must get some content on your site.