Whether you are an online business owner or an Internet marketer trying to sell affiliate programs, there is no doubt that your main goal is to sell products and services to people landing on your website. Yes, you need good keyword research for this and yes, you need high Google rankings as well, but what happens when you have those both but visitors do not convert?

Before digging more into the subject you must know that a conversion does not necessarily means a sale: it could also mean a newsletter subscription or users clicking on some parts of your website such as banners and so on. When things seem to be worse than ever ClickTale literally jumps into the spotlights with an amazing service.

This service has been online since 2006 and basically what it does is recording every movement, keyboard touch and mouse roll over your website your visitors do! That is simply amazing! Knowing exactly what they are doing once they have landed on your page could definitely help you improve it so that conversion numbers drastically grow.

Although there are many other services providing heatmaps, graphics etc of what actions visitors take on your website, ClickTale goes one step further and records their movement/clicks. Things you can learn by just visualizing your visitors’ actions:

-          What part of your website they stay longer on (interesting content maybe?)

-          Where do they click? (do they click on banners? Do they click on “click here” links?)

-          Last, but not least: why don’t they convert?

Simply by viewing what actions they take on your website you can immediately see where’s more potential for conversions, what pages convert better and most important, why they convert better! By making some changes based on your visitors’ behaviour you can literally skyrocket your conversions without the need of getting more traffic to your website. A must for every online business!

Although increasing the SERPs for a website is probably the best way of getting laser targeted visitors in need to buy the services/products you are selling, there are many other places from where you could grab a good piece of traffic. This blog post should be about forums.

Although community forums are mainly used by SEOs for link building, these are some great places to grab attention and to drive more customers for your business. There are probably tens of forums for each and any niche and thousands for more popular ones such as SEO, web design, weight loss and so on.

However, not just any post added on a forum could bring visitors to your website. Here are some great tips when replying/creating new threads on an industry related forum:

1.      Always use a signature – most important

Many forums allow adding a signature with a link back to your website after 1, 10 or 100 posts. Do not start spamming the boards with posts such as “great writing” etc only for getting a signature. Always try to add some value to what you reply.

Moreover, use a great call to action when composing it. Probably the best way for doing this is to use this pattern: text url+anchor text.

2.      Create threads

Open threads containing tips related to your niche. Do not try to copy/paste from other places, people will notice that and you will not get the desired results.

3.      Be interesting

Always add some spice to a post. Search most viewed posts and try to add a little from your experience. Those posts are the most visited ones and your expertise in a certain niche will be rewarded with traffic.

4.      Check grammar/spelling

Always do that! We all make mistakes but adding a post with many grammatical errors will raise some flags here and there.

Getting higher rankings in  search engines is any marketer or business owner’s dream. Just creating a website and leaving it like that does not translate into a flood of traffic and sales, on the contrary, once it has been developed a proper SEO strategy should be applied.

As any SEO strategy includes link building, there are many folks out there trying to get results faster and not few times they have face this problem called “Google penalty”. Basically this means that you have been caught doing un-ethical link building such as spamming, over-optimisation and so on.

Here are some tips to prevent being penalised by the search engines or even worse, banned from appearing in their index. There are two major penalties that a website can receive, here they are below:

1.      Anchor text over-optimisation

We all know that getting higher rankings for a certain keyword means getting backlinks anchored with that very keyword, but going overboard with this can lead to a over-optimisation penalty. Building backlinks anchored only with a keyword can definitely trigger some red flags.

Prevention – use a set of long tail keywords and point backlinks to your website anchored with those. Not only that you will prevent getting an anchor text over-optimisation penalty but you will also start ranking for other words that might bring you some targeted traffic.

2.      Link buying penalty

Although Google clearly states that any attempt to manipulate search results by buying links can affect a website’s rankings, there are thousands of website owners still choosing this route. There are many places where people can buy links and this market seems to be huge. You should definitely avoid this practice and try to aim for natural backlinks earned by merit – best strategy on the long run

How many times have you see ads like the above one? How many times did you encounter sales threads like that on webmaster forums? Have you ever considered outsourcing link building to companies/freelancers claiming to deliver thousands of backlinks to your money site? Think twice before doing this!

Search engines’ algorithms have evolved massively over the years and you should probably know by now that any unnatural link building campaign can do more harm to your website than raising its rankings. But how can this type of links harm your rankings?

First of all, link spikes play a major role in determining whether a company has engaged into using “black hat” methods to trick the search engines. It is unlikely that a website can receive hundreds of backlinks in a day or so, all anchored with a certain keyword and most of all coming from the same platforms (forums, blogs etc). When talking about massive linking we refer of course to:

Blogs – blog comments with Scrapebox/Xrumer

Forums – forum profiles with Xrumer/SenukeX/SickSubmitter

Social bookmarks – made with tools such as Bookmarking Demon and so on

The interesting thing is that these links have their place in a link building strategy, however not when it comes to linking to money sites. You can use these with great results on “buffer sites”, such as: social networking websites, guest posts, reviews and so on for getting more link juice to those, link juice that it is transferred to your money site, washed.

These days quality comes over quantity so before getting thousands of backlinks to your website, think twice and have a chat with an experienced SEO company that could tailor a safe strategy based on your requirements/website.

Although increasing the SERPs for a certain website is probably the best way of getting laser targeted visitors in need to buy the services/products you are selling, there are many other places from where you could grab a good piece of traffic.

Although community forums are mainly used by SEOs for link building, these are a great place to grab attention and to drive more customers for your business. There are probably tons of forums for each and any niche and thousands for more popular ones such as SEO, web design, weight loss and so on.

However, not just any post added on a forum could bring visitors to your website. Here are some great tips when replying/creating new threads on an industry related forum:

1.      Always use a signature – most important

Many forums allow adding a signature with a link back to your website after 1, 10 or 100 posts. Do not start spamming the boards with posts such as “great writing” etc only for getting a signature. Always try to add some value to what you reply.

However, use a great call to action when composing it. Probably the best way for doing this is to use this pattern: text url+anchor text.

2.      Create threads

Open threads containing tips related to your niche. Do not try to copy/paste from other places, people will notice that and you will not get the desired results.

3.      Be interesting

Always add some spice to a post. Search most viewed posts and try to add a little from your experience. Those posts are the most visited ones and your expertise in a certain niche will be rewarded with traffic.

4.      Check grammar/spelling

Always do that! We all make mistake but adding a post with many grammatical error will raise some flags here and there.

We have written in the past about link pyramids and a link building strategies that seem to be “the next best thing” after link wheels. Basically, the idea is to setup the backlinks for a certain website in layers, such as:

1^st layer – these are the best links, all of them pointing to your landing pages with the best anchor text; most SEOs use for the first tier social networking websites as they are aged and hold lot of authority but lately many SEOs are starting to use links from reviews and Build My Rank articles, as they usually come from quality places

2^nd layer – depending on how many layers your pyramid will consist of, you can use for this one again blog posts, high PR forum profiles or even other social networks

3^rd layer – this is most of the times done by automation tools such as Article Marketing Robot, Xrumer or Scrapebox; these are the worst links a landing page could receive but pointing to buffer sites make an excellent choice to give an extra link juice

But what keywords should you use as anchors for 2^nd and 3^rd layers? Before being closed, Google Wonder Wheel was a great choice to find LSI keywords to use as anchors, however there are many other good places to find related keywords to use. From Google Keyword Tool to suggestion tool, these are some recommended places to start looking for related long tail keywords to be used in your link building campaign.