Why All SEO Mods Suck!
 

When we look to getting an SEO mod/hack for our forums, we're hoping the result will be better search results on google, yahoo, bing, whatever the search engine is. Unfortunately, no mod/hack can do this for us. At best, they might tidy a few things, but in reality, you have to put in the time. We've all heard that its all about content, but what does this actually mean?

I've just returned from SEO training and would like to share the knowledge i've just gained which dispelled any myths, and made clear what actually increases SEO.

The two main things that increased SEO is sitelinks (other websites linking to your site) and Content relevancy (how clear your result is to what the user is searching for). Lets start with Content relevancy.


If your content is not relevant to what the user is searching, you wont even rank on google. There are a number of ways we are able to help google to establish how relevant our content is. This goes beyond the article or body of text.

Title Text

The first things to consider is the title of your thread. You need to begin by asking yourself what the user would be searching for. If you're a clothing website and the user is searching for mens polo shirts, then those keywords need to be the first thing in a number of places.

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2014/05/51.png

The red arrows are what comes from your thread title. You need to consider your titles as accurately as possible to the user search.

Photo/Image Naming

Another thing that people don't consider is the photo URL. If you are uploading an image, make sure that its not saved and uploaded as something like 8373695.jpg as this tells google nothing. you'll want to rename it to be mens_polo_shirts.jpg this is much more friendly, do this before uploading it.

No Pogo

Once you have all these things in place, make sure your article itself is clear and relevant to that search. This means the user searching will settle on your page. Google knows if a user clicks your link and if in 3 - 5 seconds they leave your site and go back to google for a new search result. This is called 'pogoing'. We've all done it, searched for something and gone through a bunch of search results clicking and going back to google for the next result. You want the user to enjoy and feel satisfied with your site as their search result.


Site links perform 70% of how google knows that you are a good website to trust. If you have the search results from your content. Its now all about your site authority and strength, but what are site links?

Site links are other websites sharing/linking to your website. This can be anywhere on their website and any url from your web site. The more authority and credibility a website has, the stronger their link power to your site. For example... in the UK the BBC website has millions of viewers a month and as considered one of the strongest authorities. Most big companies have powerful link authority that if they share your url, some of the link power flows to your website giving your more authority also.

Do's and Dont's

Don't
Cheating
If you try to cheat google by building a number of websites and adding your website to them, google knows this and can tell if you own them all. There is a high probability that you would be penalised for this by google and loose your ranking altogether. This has happened to many websites.

Spamming
Don't go to blogs, pages, forums and post things like hey this is great check out our website at www.******.com This will likely just get deleted and give you a bad rep.

Begging
Dont send messages do anyone and everyone asking if they'll link to your site. They'll likely get removed after a while anyways and it won't give you the best reputation. If you have a few close friends you can ask, thats fine, just dont beg people.

Do

Create interesting articles offering things people like, want and need. If you are a computer website then an article of your Top 10 Lap Tops or Top 10 computer fails. These get shared a lot and will result in site links.

Also, contacting big companies and offering to write an article or a blog on them is a great way to get a site link. If you write an article/blog called computers.com's 2014 best computer and talk all about that one company, of course they're going to share it on their website's and blogs, who wouldn't? This is a great way of building site authority as it offers something for free.

Bloggers in your field will have their twitter followers, facebook followers and so on. There is nothing a blogger likes more than people who visit their blogs and comment. Build a relationship with them over time by leaving helpful comments that contribute to their post. After a while they'll begin to recognise your name. Then you can send them an email saying something like 'hi, i love your blog and keep up to date with what you write. I'd love to write and article for you' bloggers often run out of things to write about and its very time consuming. This way, they will be thankful for the help and likely, link to your site.

Shares also help with SEO. Personal fb pages google cant see but business, company, community 'pages' they can.

I hope this has been helpful as it has to me. I have so much work now to do on Our Site but maybe you can give me some pointers :)

Most of this is common sense to those of us who been involved in SEO for a while.

There are a couple of things I would like to mention, Google ( or any search engine) will not recognise an image simply by calling it what it is, so even if you call it poloshirt.jpg, all google knows is that it is an image.

What images need is the "alt" tag, the alt tag is very important, it tells search engines what the image is an image of, it also helps disabled viewers form an image in their mind.

Every image you upload should have an "alt" tag.

Other things that are needed is a decent robots.txt, and a decent sitemap. Sitemaps are not 100% essential because Google will crawl all the pages it can find anyway.

There is no quick fix, it can take google weeks to crawl and index your site, so to speed up the process you need that robots.txt to stop it crawling unnecessary pages.

One last thing, the construction of a 404 redirect page is another essential, to search engines a 404 error is a dead end, a 404 page that includes a link back to a page gives the engine a way out.

Thanks thats very helpful. This is only common sense if you are 'in the know' but statistics of public knowledge of how SEO works is very different hence the article.

In regards to the <alt> tags. How do you add these to an image?

The alt tag is always the last thing in the link to the image, before the closing />

When uploading image from Photobucket, it's important to remember that it will complete the alt tag with whatever it has filed the image as, you have to alter this manually to suit the image :


This :
<img src="http://i103.photobucket.com/albums/m126/SeppBlatter/LD1_zpsb0c158e8.png" border="0" alt=" photo LD1_zpsb0c158e8.png"/></a>


Should be altered to this :

<img src="http://i103.photobucket.com/albums/m126/SeppBlatter/LD1_zpsb0c158e8.png" border="0" alt=" image name.png"/></a>

Relevant and timely content is king, always has been.

This does not mean that SEO Mods suck. It means they can't do anything to help you, if your site sucks.

So does it have to be from a 3rd party source or can we do it from our own sites? Like if i upload to my own site and reference from my site, where do the alt tags do and how to i access the image alt tags to customise them.

There is no requirement for the ordering of content within an html tag

If you want, it can be <img alt="" title="" class="" style="" id="" height="" width="" src="" />

I just dont know where this information is stored and how i edit it

If you are copying an image from the net by using right click and "Copy Image Location" when you post that link between the [img] tags, that is the time to edit the "alt" tag for it.

If you are referring to it from your own files then it's the same process, if you are running VB4 there is a MOD that will do it all for you.

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=277033

wow, nice article... I will be testing [DBTech] DragonByte SEO however, but will not change my url structure.