Webmaster Forum - UK Webmasters Resource

Of the thousands of forums online, perhaps only a few hundred are webmaster related. Of those, only a handful are UK focused. To the credit of the Internet in general and webmaster communities in particular, most forums tend to know no international bounds. Members are usually drawn from all nations of the world, as long as they can communicate in the forums primary language. Some forums with a large population of a particular language speaker tend to create sub forums for each group - for example - the German language sub forums at VBSEO.

Despite the aforementioned advantages and the composition of Webmaster forums, now and again, the need for a forum that focuses on a particular community arises. This was why the UK Webmaster Forum was created. Having said that, the forum is now exclusively for UK users, it discusses and highlights UK issues more than the generic Webmaster forums online today.

Though created a few years ago, UK webmaster forums was left ‘fallow’ for a few years, before it was recently given a new lease on life through a re-launch that witnessed the forum relocating from a sub folder of UK Webmaster World to its own dedicated sub domain. The newly lunched forum is being positioned to focus on issues top most on webmaster agenda such as Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Promotion, Web Hosting, Domain Name registration and Web Directory issues.

Since its re-launch, the forum has been attracting new users and growing steadily on a daily basis. Some of the more popular sections of the forum apart from the General Talk threads are the General Search Engine discussion threads - which deals with anything and everything to do with search engines and The Exchange - which is the thread you need to visit if you want to exchange posts, signature or even services with other webmasters. The Web Hosting forum looks at web hosting issues, the Web Directory section deals with Web Directory aspects of website promotion and the Complete Beginners forum are the threads where novice webmasters can ask questions.

I strongly suggest that you visit the UK Webmaster Forum and check out what all they have to offer.

Original Article written by Temi of UK Webmaster Forum, edited by Jumpenjuhosaphat

SEO - Where to Begin

For the inexperienced web master, finding out where to begin can be as hard as learning a new language. In an industry that's overly populated with condescending know-it-alls that can't seem to offer much help, finding your place might seem like a hopeless dream. Certainly, there are countless e books on the subject of search engine optimization, but where do you go when the pages don't answer your many questions?

Fortunately, I have spent the previous 8 months discovering the answer to that question. I have experienced dozens of SEO communities, I even subscribe to a few of them. I've recently had the pleasure of coming across an incredible community: v7n SEO forum is a community thats home to a host of very knowledgeable and down to Earth SEO professionals who seem to remember what it's like to need help. Above that, there is a sense of community at v7n that you seldom find in any web master forum. In fact it was the sense of community that impressed me most. I have spent the better part of 8 months as a moderator at another SEO forum, once I discovered v7n I realized that the sense of community had been missing from the forum I've called home for the past 8 months. v7n inspired me to work harder on that sense of community in my own forum. It's for that reason along with how grounded the v7n forum is that I would suggest you give them a look, you're not likely to regret it. Visit the v7n SEO forum.

Shadow Link Directory, what is it?

Shadow Links Explained

A shadow link is quite simply a link that lurks in the shadows. Shadow links(Slinks) provide a cleaner linking interface that can list multiple links in a more attractive fashion. What this means to webmasters is not only will your link be listed, which is usually beneficial, but more information can be stored on the pages that your links will appear on without the risk of the page becoming overly cluttered. Information like extended descriptions can be included in your site submissions when submitting to directories that use this new feature. Images are another tidbit that can easily be displayed. Where is this information displayed? Why in the Slink View Port of course....

Slink View Port

The shadow link view port is a small section of a page dedicated solely to displaying information about the sites that it links to. Along each side of the Slink view port are rows of small images. When a visitor runs their mouse over any of these small images, the Slink view port comes to life, bringing with it as little or as much information as the sites promotion team chooses to display. The information it displays could simply be a larger example image of the sites front page. It could also display a description made up of several thousand words, an article or snippet of an article featured at the targeted site, or a larger image of the targeted sites front page. You could also include any length of text along with the image of your site.

Where do I find a directory featuring Slinks?

As of today's date, this new feature isn't available. However, LinkSlinky.com will make this feature available with the launch of the new site beginning February 8th, 2007.

That's neat, so what else?

To top it all off, besides offering a new and unique directory concept, LinkSLinky will be offering other incentives to site owners. Each page in LinkSlinky's directory will have available 10 Slink spaces. The 10 lucky sites that share this space will alternately display their sites title and description in the pages head. Each of these 10 sites will also be given two spaces to place a single keyword or keyphrase in the pages meta keywords area. Alternate and title tags will be used on each image that is displayed on every page of the site. Alternate and title tags for your site will be the same as your site's name unless you specify otherwise during the site submission process.

How do I submit my site?

Submitting your site couldn't be any easier. Each field in the submission form, whether it's a required field or not, has a help Slink to help guide you if you should run in to any troubles or questions along the way.
There is no need to navigate through an unfriendly directory to the appropriate category before being allowed to submit your site. The categories are all listed on the submission page, you just need to select the category that best suits your site. As always, reciprocal links are appreciated, however they are not required to be listed in the directory.

What are the submission guidelines?

To be approved for acceptance into the LinkSlinky directory, sites must abide by a quality standard. Sites that are poorly designed or that offer little content are less likely to meet LinkSlinky's approval standard than well designed sites with unique and rich content. Spam, pop-ups, spy ware, ad ware, adult related sites, sites deemed illegal by United States legal standards and pharmaceutical sites will not be approved. If a site subscribes to a premium listing at LinkSlinky and is not approved, a full refund will be given promptly. Sites that are not approved will be given a reason for disapproval by a human, so you will know what you need to do to be included in the LinkSlinky directory.

What is LinkSlinky doing to promote?

I have been working on the concept behind LinkSlinky for 6 months, and have taken many steps towards marketing this new concept. Steps including name recognition branding, link building, writing articles, getting other webmasters involved(some quite excitedly), research, and obviously development. As part of an ongoing effort to promote and advance LinkSlinky, I will keep a report of all efforts made to promote LinkSlinky, and make the report available publicly for the webmasters and site promoters included in the LinkSlinky directory to view at their discretion. I also vow to place a minimum of 80% of LinkSlinky's revenue back into promotion of LinkSlinky for a minimum of 2 months and a minimum of 25% thereafter, beginning on the date of launch. The promotion costs will also be a matter of public record.

Thank you and regards,

David Davis

Increasing off page link relevance.

When building links for a site, it's important to note that the relevance of the page that contains your link is of utmost importance. Many webmasters may not be aware that they can control the relevance of the site that is linking to them. Let's begin by examining the factors that effect a page's relevance to your site:

• Page title


• Page URL
  


• Tag text(em,strong,h1-6, alt attribute, et cetera


• Body content


• Meta description


• Link anchor text

Of these, most webmaster think that they only really have control over the link anchor text, which isn't always true. There are some ways in which you can control the relevance of the body content, and sometimes the tag text. Here are a few examples:

• Directories


• Forums


• Portals


• Social networks


• Free site hosts(geocities, angelfire)

Directories

Most internet web directories require that you enter a description of your site. Most webmasters don't take advantage of this option to it's best ability. Although, some directories are very limited on how many characters you are allowed to enter, typical directories allow between 200-250 character descriptions. That should be plenty to help build a pages relevance to your site's content. Use this space to make a detailed description of your site, use as many targeted keywords as you can. Avoid making short descriptions like "a site about racing cars". That sort of description is very vague, and not keyword rich.

Forums

Forums can offer some of the best relevance to a site that you can find, especially if the forum is themed around the content that your site is offering. Take advantage of the signature bar, but take care to read and understand the rules pertaining to signature bar links. Create new topics, use topic headings that are descriptive of of the topic itself, and be sure to try and include some targeted keywords in the topic heading. The body of the post is a great place to plump up the pages relevance. Use targeted keywords, and make your postings sensible to attract visitors to your site while improving relevance.

Portals

Although some Portals make abundant use of the nofollow attribute, this is still a great place to get targeted traffic from. A portal site, like the name implies, is a site that leads you to other sites. On a portal site, you can make blog entries, join in on niche theme forums, add images, rss feeds, and even add links to your site. I take advantage of this type of site, regardless of the nofollow attribute. Although the major search engines admit that they don't count a nofollow link as a "vote" from the referring site, none say that they don't take site relevance into consideration when determining SERP placement, which is by far more important that PR is in the first place.

Social Networks

A cross between a portal and a free site provider, social networks are the most popular type of site on the web. You are permitted to edit your profile and include all types of tidbits, including images, links, and anything else that you'd like to include or write about. Your profile gets "hits" when people stumble across it. You have friends, which are basically other profiles linking to your profile from there's. The more friends you have, the more exposure you have to your profile. This is another great place to build relevance. Write articles or stories that pertain to your site, or write an extended description. Don't forget to place links in the body of your articles and description, as well as placing links in the link roll or menu bars.

Free site hosts

There are several good examples of free site hosts. Blogger is a great free blog site that permits you almost full control over the design and layout of your blog. In essence, this is no different than having a blog hosted at your own domain, except that blogger advertises your blog entries for you, giving you more exposure.

Another great way to build relevance is by creating several 3 to 5 page sites at as many free hosts as you can find. TopCities and GeoCities are a couple of good free host providers. They place ads on your site to help recover hosting costs, usually at the top of your page. That doesn't matter as much though, you should build these sites for the benefit of the search engines, and SE's don't care about ads.

You shouldn't copy and paste a hundred sites that are the same all over the internet. You should try to make each of your small sites unique and descriptive of the content you offer at your main site. You should also market these small sites to help boost their PR and in turn, boost your main site.

Conclusion

This is just a few ideas on helping to boost off page relevance. The amount of control you have over off page factors is determined mostly by your abilities and the amount of time that you are willing to spend pursuing your marketing plans.

Regarding high PR links

If you get a couple of high PR links it might help you. But it depends on the site. How many links are there on the page that your link appears on? What position in the HTML does your page occur(not on the displayed page)? Is there a nofollow attribute added to your link?

In many cases, it could possibly benefit you more to get 150 or 200 PR0 links than 4 or 5 PR8 or 9 links. For example, w3.org sells links for $1000.00, but places the nofollow attribute on all of their links, making the link, as far as SEO goes, worthless.

Having a high PR rank will not alone increase your traffic. If you have 1 or 2 IBL's from high PR sites, then what ever keyphrase's you are targeting will not experience much change in the SERP's(search engine results position), especially if those sites are not relevant to the content that your site offers. It would be more beneficial to get IBL's from sites that are similar to yours in content than it would to get links from higher PR sites. If you are considering purchasing text links on high PR sites, then I urge you to reconsider. High PR sites charge a lot of money for links and you could accomplish the same thing for a lot less money, plus get higher in the SERP's.

My best advice, hit the search engines, find websites that are similar to yours in content and request they add your link to their site. Some sites may require a reciprocal link, but not all do. Ignore the PR of other sites, get links anywhere you can, after all, a link is a link, and any single one of them could help drive more traffic to your site.

SEO Study

A recent study on the effectiveness of SEO techniques involving on and off page factors has been released. This study, carried out by Fortune Interactive, compares the top 10 sites for each of the 3 major search engines, Google, Yahoo, and MSN, for a particular keyword. In this case, the keyword was laptop.

This study looked at each of the top 10's website, as well as the websites of their IBL's(inbound links), and the effect that certain factors have on the position of the website on the SERP's.

The following is a list of each factor studied:

Off Page Factors

• IBL quality - The quality of the inbound link is determined not by the relevance of the referring webpage, but the PR(page rank) of the referrer.


• IBL relevance - The relevance of the refering page.


• IBL title keyword - The density of the keyword (laptop) in the title of the IBL.


• IBL anchor keyword - The density of the keyword (laptop) in the anchor of the IBL.


• IBL quantity - This is the number of unique IBL's referring to your site.

On Page Factors

• Title Keyword - The density of the keyword in the title of your page.


• Anchor Keyword - The density of the keyword in the anchors on your page.


• Body Keyword - The density of the keyword in the body of your page.


• Content Relevance - The relevance that the content has to the keyword.


• Title Content - [not specified] - This could be how relevant the title is in comparison to the content, or the density of the title within the content.

The following chart shows the level of importance of each factor, relative to other factors. Image courtesy of Fortune Interactive


The following chart is a numerical representation of the importance of each factor in relation to IBL quantity. Image courtesy of Fortune Interactive



As you can see, IBL quality is 42 times more important than IBL quantity.

For more information, please see the report by Fortune Interactive.

For more SEO/SEM advice and information, please visit the SEO Forum, and tell them jumpenjuhosaphat sent you.