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What is SEO Strategy?

When it comes to SEO, you may have come across many people talking about SEO strategy. There’s a good reason too. Basically SEO has never been straight forward and it never will be. As Google continues to change its search engine algorithm on ranking websites Strategy’s continue to change. So let’s get straight to the point.

WHAT IS SEO STRATEGY?

Well as you could imagine it’s the strategy you will take to improve your search engine listings. Over the years, SEO’s have categorized different strategy’s into different category’s. For the past few years the main strategies have been black hat and white hat. Recently people have started to mix the two and started to call it gray hat. To keep this short basically black hat strategy’s are usually un ethical such as spam. Where as white hat strategy’s are more ethical usually manual strategies where as black hat is usually automated using programs. Usually when it come’s to an SEO strategy the main focus is building back links. Though this is not the only ranking factor Google uses for their algorithm it is still (though arguable) the main ranking factor. It’s how Google see’s how popular your website is. I think the problem that most are having are quality of links. Where as black hat is all about quantity and not quality.

HOW SHOULD I FORMULATE MY STRATEGY?

Well first you must decide on the method you would like to use to obtain your backlinks. Do you want quality or quantity? Do you want to automate the process? Make easy money online? This is where i’ll step in for a second. I highly advise you against using an automated solution, this does not mean don’t buy SEO products and so on so forth. Though if you are looking for a program to do all the hard work then think again. Many people have gone down the road of black hat tactics and over the years they have succeeded in manipulating the search results. Google is no longer primitive and are continuously fighting against spam. Unfortunately this is where it get’s difficult. From my study’s I would say that older sites that have ranked using black hat methods and had their websites stick in the search results don’t seem to be the sites that are effected. Don’t get me wrong a lot of sites have lost their rankings over night but some, oddly enough just haven’t been effected. Where as I’ve noticed new sites to be flagged straight away. So the only option really is using white hat methods. This is also a problem, it’s hard and constant work. At time’s, depending on your niche, you could spend all day and result in no backlinks. Though if you work hard with white hat methods there’s a good chance you could eventually rank very well, not only well but it should stick.

 

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Latest SEO Tips

Let’s face it, it is easy to fire someone who is a total menace. When it comes to someone you despise, vengeance can come quickly and mercilessly, severing the former employee from the company in a master stroke. And to be honest, you probably feel good about it too. But what about firing someone who is upbeat, well-liked, and a genuinely good human being?

I was reading an article over at Datamation by Eric Spiegel entitled Dealing with Unaccountable Developers. He discussed having to fire a developer who was decent at their job but always late in turning in assignments. He confessed that if the developer was a jerk it would have been no problem, but since he was a well liked guy it was very difficult.

Now imagine a new scenario. You work in a decent sized company (not too large that everything is impersonal, but not so small that everyone can go to lunch at the same restaurant, at the same time) and unfortunately a round of layoffs is about to happen. Let’s now take you and a duplicate of you. Both does the same good job at work, one though is upbeat and helpful the other is well a jerk.

It’s not just the fact that positive people are pleasant and the working environment is such a nice place with that sort of work conditions (ok well that is a really big reason), but optimistic, positive people are, as they said in the Army, a force multiplier. Positive people make me work harder because work becomes fun. It also makes it so I don’t dread getting up in the morning.

Which one do you think will keep their job? I know what you are saying, “Dave, it’s not even a contest me and myself obviously have the same skills and between the two of us of course they are going to keep the person who isn’t a hellion.”

True enough. So how about this, you have a team of say ten employees. Out of the ten, your brightest star is a real ass. The type of guy that put everyone in a foul mood. Unfortunately the guy is absolutely brilliant, a fact he knows all too well and reminds everyone of it every day. The other 9 employees aren’t great, but they are bad. They get the job done for the most. You need to cut one person from the team for budget concerns. Who would you cut?
Difficult. See the easy route would be to fire one of the under performers. However, the question is, why are they underperforming? Just as the positive people make work less of a problem and may even make it fun and a joy to do, the negative people produce a hostile working environment. Instead of focusing on work, the nine people could be starring at the clock waiting for the work day to end so they can get the hell out of Dodge. I was talking to Ron about this the other day and he had actual experience with this a while back.

He had a star employee, one who performed far better than anyone, however he was difficult to be around let alone work with. The rest of the team wasn’t bad, they were, well average. Ron had to fire one of them, but the choice was difficult. In the end, he fired the “talent.” He was just too high maintenance and was not a team player in the truest sense of the word. What was interesting was the change to the team that took place after the jerk was fired. In a few days, the office environment was jovial and warm. The team ended up producing a lot more. In fact, they produced more than enough to make up for the loss. It was a gamble in some respects, obviously the jerk was the best employee and if all things remained as is, firing him would have crippled the team. Often times however, an individual’s performance doesn’t just hinge on themselves but on other varying factors within the office.

So in summary, optimism and positive thinking, doesn’t just help you be content, it helps those around you and it may even save your job.

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4 Useful Freeware Tools for Windows

Firstly, if you don’t know what freeware software’s are then let me give you a little introduction of it. Freeware software are basically the software which can be used free of cost. But, they comes with a copyright license in which we cannot edit/modify the software. Though they can be distributed to your friends/family as they’re free.

Another benefit of freeware software’s is sometimes they’re better the paid software’s as well. Though it also depends upon the developer like how often he wishes to update the software and how he/she provides the support for it. Then also, a freeware software is like a life-saving solution against heavily charged software’s.

Today, I’m going to share with you a list of four really helpful freeware tools which you’ll surely love and some of you might be using them already as well.

This tool can be considered as a replacement to the MS Office pack. It does all the things like basic writer, presentation, plan maker, etc. It is also better then OpenOffice.org, which is also a replacement of MS Office. It is compatible with Windows as well as Ubuntu and works very well on both the OS. But, unfortunately it has a drawback. It doesn’t work with the latest version’s of Windows. You’ll need to use the earlier versions of Windows but then also it can be very useful.

I’m sure some of you guys would surely be familiar with this tool. If not then let me give you a basic introduction of it. MalwareBytes is basically a Anti-Malware software which’ll protect your computer against Virus, Trojan, Malware, etc. It is the best freeware software I’ve used till now and I’m sure you’ll also like it.

Another freeware software which is very handy tool. If you haven’t been using this tool then I’m sure you’ve been missing lot of fun lately. This tool is just superb in a layman language. It’ll help you to share your screen with your friends easily. So, if you’ve ever got a problem in your PC then you can ask your friend to solve that without moving from your own PC’s. Though, this tool is only for Personal use. If you want to use it commercially you’ll need to buy a license for that.

Have you ever wanted a free software like Microsoft Outlook? Then this is your solution. This tool is very handy tool for all those who are looking for an alternative of MS Outlook. It is completely free and I just love using this software. Also, the interface is very easy to use and you’d be amazed how such a tool can be completely free. Also one more good thing about this tool is you can also add this in your FireFox browser and can make the most out of it. Though it just works in selected themes.

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Keyword Research How To

Keyword research should be one of the first things you do if you want to perform search engine optimization on a web page. You should do keyword research even before you write the text content for your page.

Let’s suppose you want to sell pet toys and want to search engine optimize particular product pages on the site. Keyword research involves determining what keyword phrases you want to target. The first thought that comes to mind would be “pet toys”.

However, simply running that search for that phrase in any search engine would tell you that this is a very popular keyword phrase that generates a lot of search results. You will also notice that the top search results are dominated by top retailers of well known and recognizable brands. You will also notice that there are a lot of advertised or sponsored ads on those pages as well.

As a small business owner, it is very difficult to compete with these large retailers in the organic search results ranking. Even if you pay for advertising, it would still be quite difficult to compete with these large retailers who have almost unlimited amounts of advertising dollars. Even if you can compete with them, it would be very expensive.

The point is that the keyword phrase “pet toys” is too broad, the competition is too tough, and it is a keyword phrase that is difficult to optimize for.

To remedy the problem, you want to narrow the keyword phrase to be more specific. Is the product description page for dogs or for cats? What kind of toys? Can you lengthen the phrases? Studies have shown that users are now typing in longer and longer search phrases than before. So you can still do well on longer keyword phrases (at least ones that are longer than two words).

Let’s say that you have narrowed it down to “cat toys”. That is better. A quick test on Google shows that this generates a 29 million search results as opposed to 32 million search results for “pet toys”.

Nevertheless, this is still too broad. How about “cat chew toys”? That’s better. This search phrase is narrower and enables your page to be able to do well with the proper optimization. We just have to make sure that this phrase has enough searches. It is no good if no one is searching that phrase.

The best way to determine how many people are searching this term is to use the Google External Keywords Tool. Just type in the key phrase and see how many monthly search Google gets for that term. Since Google is the leading search engine that processes the majority of the searches, this is a fairly accurate reflection of what people are likely to type into the search field.

Although you want to focus your keyword phrase, you don’t want to go too narrow such that the key phrase is rarely or never searched by user. For example, if you put in “feline chew toys” into the Google External Keyword Tool, you will find that hardly anyone searches that phrase. Therefore, that phrase would be too obscure. It is best to stick with “cat chew toys.”

SEO keyword analysis is an art. You have to find just the right balance between targeting a niche audience versus getting enough search volume.

STEPS TO EFFECTIVE KEYWORD RESEARCH

An understanding of SEO Keyword Research is necessary to perform Effective Keyword SEO Research;

1. Make an initial list of every possible search word/phrase referred to as keywords that a potential customer may use to search for your product, information or services that you have on your website. Use more phrases rather then individual words.

2. Don’t use highly competitive keywords initially in the first phase of your seo as your seo handwork would get wasted. Try getting your pages ranked for less competitive keywords (but relevant) initially.

3. The more information you can include in your keywords , the better. What I mean by information is be specific about the location or services you provide. Add your location to your keyword if your content is geographically sensitive.

For example: A person may use “search engine optimization Usa” is you are looking for an SEO from Usa.

4. Add and refine the keywords you listed above by analyzing your competitors keywords. For each of the top 3 pages you find in Google, yahoo and bing, make a list of the title and keyword tags. See if you can find patterns of why these 3 pages are ranked for the keywords you wanted to be ranked for.

My approach to remove and prune the above keyword list is to

* Remove difficult terms.
* Remove Over-Competitive terms.
* Use questions for which your website would provide answers or solutions.
* Remove Ambiguous and broad terms (try to be as specific as possible).

 

5. Try to append the following most common action words to your keywords wherever relevant and make sure your website caters to them.

Some of the action words are: Free, Buy, Find, Purchase, Discounted, Lowest, Price, Luxury, Cheap and so on.

6. Avoid keywords that do not ad any value or weight to your keyword list such as: The, Of, For, Or, This, And, That, To, www, web and so on.

7. Keep track of your server logs or stats to check what people have searched for (keyword) to reach your site.

8. Ask your visitors what all keywords they had used in order to get to your site if you get a chance to interact with them and make a list. Try to pick out the most relevant keywords from the list and use them on your website.

9. Try getting a ranking by using the most common misspelled keywords.

For example: A person may use “search engine optimization” or “search engine optimization” to search for an SEO website.

10. Use both singular and plural versions of your top keywords. For example: A person may use “seo freelancer” or “seo freelancers” to search for an Freelance SEO website.

11. Use Specialized Keyword Tools to measure the actual statistics or popularity that your keywords. Eliminate the few that are not getting traffic.

Keyword Research Tools: Word Tracker, Google Ad words Keyword Tool.

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10 Steps to Knowing Thy Purpose and Thy Business

When I meet with my clients and go through the process of helping them identify their business marketing goals, I not only ask them WHAT they do in their business to make money, I also ask them HOW they do it. This generally leads to a more indepth discussion about what they perceive their customers needing vs. wanting of them. It also brings to the forefront their business purpose. I am often surprised at how many people are in business and they don’t really understand their purpose.

Today I met with the co-owners of a health care consulting company who are caught between wanting to grow their business in a new direction and the daily struggle of being pulled back into work that their customers are needing from them right now. They have so much clutter in their way they can’t focus on setting new goals.

This is a common problem that many small businesses face as they attempt to grow, including my own. After I returned to my office, I took out a notebook and began to write down my businesses goals. This is an important component of any marketing plan, by the way. It’s also a section in my upcoming new book. Funny thing was, I hadn’t reviewed my own business goals since I last wrote my marketing plan three years ago! Shame on me. It was time for a critical review.

Once I wrote down all of the basics such as sales targets, the amount of money I want to make after expenses, etc. I began by asking myself the same questions that I ask of my clients. Now, I have to warn you that this process only works if you are honest with yourself. For me, I believe in marketing from within. This means that I believe in staying true to who I am and translating my “personality” to my business identity. I encourage my clients to do the same not only because it feels good, but because it creates the basis for your unique selling proposition. For me the question quickly became how can I meet my financial goals and do it with “heart”? How many businesses today say they are “committed to meeting and exceeding their customer’s expectations” and have “excellent” products and offer “superior” service. Don’t we all do this? One of the most important differentiators between competing business today is the level of heart within the company. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com, Inc. describes in his book, “Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, And Purpose,” how he and his company refined their entire business purpose to this statement — “Zappos is about delivering happiness to the world.” WOW! Talk about putting your heart at the forefront of your business. To identify how to market from within and how to find your business heart, ask yourself the following questions:

1. What is my primary business product, service, offering? What is my secondary offering?

3. What matters to my customer is. . . ? What they want is. . . ? What they need is. . . ?

4. My cusotmers need me for (to do). . . ? I make it easy for my customers to do business with me because I. . .?

5. Who is my competition?

6. I am different from my competitors because. . .? How involved am I in my business? How much does the business depend upon me? What do I ultimately want most out of my business?

7. The best/worst customer experience I have ever had was. . . ? It made me feel like. . . ?

8. Do I have any special talents that could give me and my business a ”leg up” on the competition?

9. List 20 adjectives that describe you (the business owner) personally. Then circle the top five that are most important to you.

10. List 20 adjectives that describe how your customers perceive you and your business. You might have to start asking your customers for this information through surveys and customer feedback forms if you don’t already have access to this type of information. Once you have your list, circle the top five that are most important to you.

All of these questions forced me to define my businesses personality profile and it also helped me locate the “heart” at the core of what I do. Suddenly, it became very clear how I plan to achieve my business and financial goals. Now I can focus my marketing goals in the same direction. After reviewing my answers, I realized that it is critical to know thyself before knowing thy business. We set goals and objectives for ourselves because it’s what we want to do so that we can achieve something we want most in our lives. The key to setting good business and marketing goals is to be willing to do something (whatever it takes) in an effort to reach that goal. Here’s a tip: setting goals without action steps is being a passive observer in your own business. That brings me to my last step. Think about what you are willing to do in order to achieve the level of success you want. In fact, there could be several answers. Take action and write them down. These are now the basis for your future goals. If you’re like me, you’ll find yourself more focused on achieving success because your purpose is clear, specific and attainable. Most importantly, once you put your goal statements on paper, you’ll be surprised at how committed you’ll become to achieving them.

“When you walk with purpose, you collide with destiny.” — Dr. Bertice Berry

Do you struggle with acheiving your goals or even setting them becasue you’re not sure what you’re doing? I would like to hear your experience with finding your business purpose and using it to set and attain your goals. Stories of success or failure are welcome. Leave a comment below. Cheers!

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Different Ways To Optimize Your Site For Mobile

There are actually a couple of ways to optimize your site for mobile devices. This has become more and more important over the past few years. Nearly everyone has a smart phone and quite a few people have tablet devices. More importantly some internet users do not even have access to anything other then a smart phone or tablet. So optimizing for these potential visitors is incredibly important. Directly mobile optimization does not effect your search engine standings within the search results. Though there is actually one major ranking factor that could be harmed by not having a mobile optimized site.

NON MOBILE OPTIMIZED SITES EFFECT YOUR SEARCH ENGINE PERFORMANCE

It’s not apparent straight away to where the link is. Though you will start to notice that if your site isn’t optimized for mobile then visitors can tend to bounce off your site once they realize they can’t easily read what you have to say. Sounds a bit out there really but statistics have shown that this is actually the case. Your website bounce rate is actually a major ranking factor. Think about it, if you was Google and you were aiming to display the most relevant results then surely a site which has users bounce of it frequently can not be of as much value as a site which keeps their visitors on their site. It’s logical thinking. So how can you optimize your site for mobile.

RESPONSIVE DESIGN

Responsive design was brought to us by CSS3 which brought along the media query. It is a fantastic way to get a mobile optimized site as you basically have separate styling for different screen sizes. If you are using a popular CMS, e-commerce or blogging platform. Such as Joomla, Magento, Opencart or wordpress then there are many developers who are developing themes for these platforms which are responsive ready. So if you are willing to do a bit of work on your site and change to a responsive theme then this can be a highly inexpensive route for you to take. Though if you are using either a platform with a bespoke design or a bespoke built platform. Then this could be incredibly time extensive and costly. Converting sites into a responsive design is much harder to achieve then building a site from scratch to be responsive. One major boost to responsive development is the twitter bootstrap framework. It’s a framework that has become a popular base for most templates and websites that are developed these days. So what could be a better approach if a site rebuild is going to be a costly route for you.

WEB APPS

On some platforms such as Magento you can purchase their web app. It basically act’s as a separate website that is only accessed by mobile devices. Actually you most likely have seen a fair few such as Ebay or Amazon. When ever you see a little link saying show main website then you know your using their web app. Responsive design does not have a separate website so being able to see your main website is impossible. There is different web apps out there I suggest having a look at them though I personally have a few problems with them. I seem to always find myself wanting to see their main website no matter how difficult it is to navigate. The web apps I encounter usually haven’t a certain feature incorporated which the main site will have. So I would make your decision wisely on which route to take.

 

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Drive SEO With Proper Keyword Use

Lately I’ve received a lot of questions and comments from my loyal blog readers asking about the best way to use keywords to organically improve their website’s or blog’s search engine optimization (SEO). Based on my personal experience and after doing a little research (phone calling) among some of my marketing colleagues, I’ve developed the following tips to help you improve your sites visibility on the Internet without spending any money. Again, this is another no cost/low cost marketing solution brought to you by your friendly “Marketing Miser Advisor”.

While most entrepreneurs have heard of the term “keyword” many of them have no idea how to use them effectively as part of their Internet marketing strategy. Basically, keywords help your website get noticed and ranked in search engines such as Google. Search engines have a scanning mechanism called “spiders” that “crawl” through websites looking for hidden codes. Specifically, spiders look for keywords that describe what your website is about and then take that information back to the search engine database. The search engine then tries to match web site keywords with the most common words and phrases used by people to search the Internet. Search Engine’s like Google, Yahoo and Bing try to match the two in an effort to give the end user the search results they are most likley looking for when they conduct a search.

When you think about what keywords should be attached to your website or blog, it’s important to think in terms of how someone might randomly search for your product or service on the web. Your goal should be to think of as many of those terms as possible for your site and then use them properly in order to get noticed by the search engine spiders.

[Que music from the movie Mission Impossible humm along in your head. . .] Your mission should you choose to accept it is. . . to make a really thorough list of all the keywords and keyword phrases that people might use to search for the information you have on your website. Then, follow these steps:

1. Repeat, Repeat, Repeat. Repeat the keyword on the page multiple times. Spiders are simple little creatures. They assume that if a keyword appears many times on a page that that word must be what the page is about. Use the keyword naturally in your writing, repeating any keyword or keyword phrase two to four times in your text.

2. Placement. Where you put the keyword on the page is critical to getting noticed. There are certain locations on a website page that are more recognizable to our web crawling friends. Where are they you ask? In the obvious places, of course. Put keywords in headlines, sub-headlines and article titles. You should also put them in link text whenever you want to link to another page or another website. Spiders assume the words in link text indicates the subject matter of the site on the other end. So the lesson here is to avoid using link text such as “Click Here” or “To Learn More” or “For More Info”. Lastly, you should also consider putting them at the beginning and the end of page copy. This helps the spiders not only recognize keywords at the beginning of their “crawl” but it also helps them remember the site as they leave.

3. Title Tags. Title tags is the text that you see in the search bar of your web browser. It is also the text that appears in the search engine results for each page of your website or blog. Both of these are generated from your page title tag. You should customizing the title tags on every page of your website and include your keywords or keyword phrases. This will help get your site ranked higher in the search engines. In fact, some of your pages might be ranked higher than others simply because of the content you have on your site.

4. Meta Tags. As if not confusing enough, yes, there is another type of “tag” that you should know about. Meta tags have only one purpose — to be read by spiders. Sadly, many entrepreneurs build their site and focus more time and attention on developing cool graphics, writing copy and adding photos that they forget about including meta tags altogether. Your meta tags should include your keywords and keyword phrases just like your title tags. You can also customize them for each page of your website.

5. Image Tags.Nearly 99% of the time that I see photos uploaded to a website, there are no image tags on them at all. Like pages on a website, any images you put on your site also need a tag. Otherwise, spiders have no way to recognize the image and no way to rank it on the web. Remember, search engines also have photo/image search ability as well, but since they cannot read images they need a text description in order to recognize it. Without image tags, images in jpg, bmp or gif formats are just black holes on your website. Make them visible to spiders by adding keywords and keyword phrases to the image titles.

Utilizing keywords properly to drive SEO is not a sure-fire way to launch your website to the top of every search engine. However, it will definitely help get your site more visibility. Unless you have a huge advertising budget to buy website visibility on the Internet (and some of you might), I suggest you try these no budget tactics and see if it doesn’t help get you ranked a little higher. Be patient. It does take a while for spiders to crawl through the web and recognize the keywords that you’ve used properly to drive your SEO.

Cheers!!

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Advertising Blog

One of the largest challenges facing any business is getting your advertising in front of enough people. Advertising can cost a lot of money. From the design to the delivery everything costs a bundle.

While you want to get your advertising done for as small as possible you can’t afford to have your advertisements look terrible. If your ad looks like your 5 year ancient place it together or the copy in your ad is terrible, you will not get fantastic results.

With that in mind I have place together 5 ways you can save on your advertising and still get the results you want.

1. Use a freelance graphics designer. The internet has made an international marketplace for freelancers and you can take advantage of that. Services like Guru.com and Elance.com make it affordable for any size business to have professional looking ads. At these sites you can see portfolios and have designers bid on your job.

2. Use targeted Pay-Per-Click advertising. Search engines like Google.com now allow you to highly target your advertising on a geographical basis. At Google.com you can target a country, a state, a city, a zip code, or even an area contained within points YOU specify. This means you can be sure you will not be paying for clicks in London when you are a local business in Springfield, MO.

3. Advertise on local websites. Find out what business in your town have a website then call them up and work out a deal to place a banner ad on their website. If you have no clue how to place together a banner ad, don’t worry. Refer back to the first item in this list. Sites like guru.com and elance.com can help.

4. Advertise on Facebook.com or MySpace.com. This tip is a lot like #2 but with a twist. These site allow you to target your ads geographically AND by the information in the users profiles. This allows you to hyper target your advertising.

5. Invest in LED Signs. LED Signs have one of the lowest costs per view of any form of advertising. There are hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of cars driving past your business everyday. For a fraction of a penny per view you can place your sales messages in front of that traffic. LED Signs also allow you to do spur of the moment advertising. You can make an instant sale at slow times and end the sale as soon as business picks back up.

There you go, five tips on how you can save on your advertising and stretch your budget without sacrificing quality or effectiveness. These tips will let you squeeze every last ounce of value out of your advertising budget with out sacrificing quality and results.

For more information on how to use Outdoor LED Signs .

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Developing Your Seo Strategy website seo review

There are many internet marketing companies out there offering their services. The variety of different methods claiming to give your site a presence on the internet can be overwhelming to choose from. Who do you believe? What methods work best? An important note to keep in mind is that the simplest and most clear cut strategies normally work the best. A good internet marketer will sit down with you and give you a straightforward marketing strategy tailored to the needs of your site. You will want to see a portfolio of proven results and techniques which have worked well for them in the past.

There are some simple steps to execute to develop a good SEO strategy, which can be used by professionals or those who are wishing to do their own internet marketing. The first thing you need to do is sit down and determine what sort of market you are aiming for with your website. What services are you offering to the internet community?

The wonderful thing about internet marketing is that you can develop a lot of new business by being prominent in the search engines. When people are looking for a product, service or information, the first thing they do is look on the search engines. When they type in a keyword relating to your site, you will want to be amongst the first sites displayed as results.

The first thing you need to do is conduct some keyword research to determine how many people are searching for words relating to your site. There are good marketing tools on the search engines that will tell you how many searches are conducted monthly for the keywords relating to your site. The keywords with the most searches are the ones you should target. Once you have done your keyword research, you can write articles with links back to your site on the keywords. These articles can be submitted to article sites. Remember that quality content is best, as you will want to build up trust and a good reputation for your site. You want the reader to enjoy the article so that they will be enticed to click on your link.

Besides article marketing, the organic way of displaying yourself in search engines, you can also submit your site to online directories. These online directories will simply list hundreds of websites relating to a specific product or service that clients are looking for.

There is also always paid advertising, and pay-per-click campaigns. You can pay to have your ad on other sites, and you can also pay to have your site appear along the top banner or side bar of the search engine results. With pay-per-click advertising, you may be on the first page, but you will have to pay every time someone clicks on your link. It is far better to work at getting your site onto the first page of the search engines by the submission of articles and your site link to online directories.

With a good SEO strategy you can work out a time frame. You can write a certain amount of articles per month, and choose the best article sites to submit them to. Submitting quality blog posts to blog sites will also give your site more exposure. Remember, the more links you get back to your site, the better. If the search engines see a good number of links relating back to your site on the internet, they will favor your site. Constantly updating the content on your website is important to. Fresh, concise information and text rich with keywords on your site will help you in your SEO too.

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Round-up #2 – Finishing the beta stage

We need just a week more, and then it’s coming: ModernBB 2.0 beta 3. In the past week, we closed around 15 issues in the ModernBB 2.0-beta.3 milestone. So, lets talk about what we did in the past week and updates to our roadmap.

Development Status
In the past 7 days, we made a great progression. One of those changes is the updater, we removed support for upgrading from PunBB 1.2, PunBB 1.3, FluxBB 1.2 and FluxBB 1.3. This makes the update file 44% lighter and makes updating faster. We also created a features that marks posts as reported so users can’t report one post more than 1 time. We’ve also merged all language files into 5 different files, making them lighter and easier to use. We’ve also Improved search, it now contains a simple search feature (by default), you can easly switch to an advanced mode.

It’s now also possible to add custom menu entries (this feature was removed in an earlier development version of beta 3, but is present in beta 2). Another update this week is done to the login form, it’s design is Improved and looks better. The whole Backstage is now also translatable (small parts weren’t in beta 2). And we also added 5 new emoticons and 13 new BBCodes to display emoticons. A big improvement is official support for MariaDB 5.3.4 and higher. We also worked a lot on Randomness (the default style) but it’s far from finished. And last but not least: bugfixes, bugfixes and even more bugfixes!

The Roadmap
We do have roadmap changes planned! ModernBB beta 3 should be finished in the upcoming week (maybe begin next week). This may result in RC1 and RC2 being pushed forward, together with the final 2.0.0. RC1 should be available somewhere mid-September, RC2 will follow a week later, with the final ModernBB 2.0.0, once again, a week later (which should be somewhere end September, begin October).

When RC1 will start development, we will also start planning ModernBB 2.1. This version will be a focus on Backstage. We want to improve the design, get rid or Yes/No radio buttons (checkboxes should be used there) and more. ModernBB 2.1 will continue the development we’ve started in ModernBB 2.0, stay tuned.

ModernBB.be
ModernBB.be itself will also get updated as soon as beta 3 is released. However, maybe you noticed it, but we’ve updated the features page multiple times in the past week, and we will continue to do this in the future. On that page you can see what features there are added in development releases. Anyway, when beta 3 launches, we will update the website with new information, a new FAQ, etc. Stay tuned!