Creating Communities | SEO Tip #52

Creating a community such as a message board, blog, or forum as an extension of your web site can be one of the most effective promotional avenues. As beneficial though might be the fresh content that comes from these communities. Forums, messages boards, and blogs are signs of an authoritative figure that provides quality content with meaning.

Google’s search engine favors fresh content compared to web pages that haven’t been updated. There are several free options including my favorite phpbb. They offer a large community themselves with a large following that provides answers to most of your questions. Setting up your community is rather easy and of course inexpensive.

Communities provide a place for your readers and users to interact and discuss their stories. Quality feedback is necessary to become a trusted figure. Offering moderator spots is a great way to get others involved since they get power spot. User-generated content is unique and fresh, it provides interaction and it details fresh problems and successes.

A blog is a journal or online diary that should be frequently updated by the author. Usually comments are and discussions are allowed to initialize peer interaction. That is the snow ball effect and just gets the ball rolling. You can expect a significant amount of traffic if you have a well written and keyword rich blog.

Forums and message boards and basically the same. They allow your users to post and answer questions. typically each question a user answers allocates a point to their account and propels them up your “forum ladder” to become a moderator or something of that nature. Having a message board or forum passes on customer feedback and information critical to your success.

3 easy ways to promote your blog or web site

It might look as a daunting task when you first start a blog. How do you promote it? Creating it, then writing, then you have to promote it. Well, most people aren’t thinking about promoting and in fact if you have well written content it will promote itself. The title being the most important along with keywords relevant to what you are writing about.

There are in fact ways to help bypass the waiting period for a newer blog to get indexed. Here are five ways to get your blog to top of Google, Yahoo and Bing search engines.

1. Yahoo, Bing, & Google Webmaster Tools – If you have a WordPress or Blogger blog or some other type you can generate a sitemap and submit that through Google Webmaster Tools. Yahoo site authenticator and Bing Tools all do the same thing. They allow you to submit your sitemap which tells these search engines that certain pages exist. It is in fact the quickest way to get indexed and the proper way.

2.  Social networking – This is actually a lot of work, but can pay off. If you like to talk and write, then this is definitely for you. You need to make accounts with Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Digg, Delicious, Squidoo, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Each one of these carries a large network of users similar to you. Each has a niche that you need to be aware of and try to work within the confines of that. 
3. Forums & Message Boards – Signing up for message boards are extremely important. They are usually live and need content and answers. If you provide answers and your profile is filled out, chances are people will view your profile and go to your blog or site more times than none. The more helpful and the more you participate, the more traffic you’ll get. Another benefit is if you can pick up a name similar to your website which should be similar to your main product or topic and that can promote you tremendously.

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