SEO Must Reads! Articles & Resources on the Web

Another great article by 'Quentin' from Big-Boards.com is very insightful:

Building a community is much more than having a forum, or implementing great SEO techniques. In fact, these elements are only the tip of the iceberg. In this article, Quentin discusses aspects such as how to target and understand the needs of your community, how to pick your staff (moderators), forum features that make your forum more sticky and ways of encouraging more activity in your forums. There is in fact much to be done in order to convert your forum... in a community!

http://www.theadminzone.com/forums/s...ad.php?t=10437

This article by 'Quentin' from Big-Boards.com is focused on basic SEO elements to be considered from a community's admin stand point. It covers a bit of everything from Google Page Rank (PR) to link building to SEF (search engine friendly) urls and has a comprehensive list of good SEO resources.

http://www.theadminzone.com/forums/s...ead.php?t=2893

Here's the single best link-building page I know of on the web today:

EricWard.com link building articles and resources

Eric Ward is considered by many to be THE link-building guru. The articles page listed above includes many resources for ethical link-building, including link popularity checking tools, and links to external link-building sites.

This is another excellent source of link-building information: The Link Building Knowledge Base

Google's Matt Cutts has an excellent blog (a necessity for anyone serious about SEO'ing for Google), at this link: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ . Here's a post in which he describes some good guidelines for link-building, and hints at a few solid strategies for naturally building links: Text Links and Pagerank.

Great links, thanks. Always great reading and hearing someone confirm your knowledge Eric Ward is someone I aspire to.

Here's an article from SEOmoz.org that covers a list of factors that typically influence the search engine rank of a particular page. Numerous factors are listed along with a simple 5-point rating system that demonstrates the estimated importance of each.

http://www.seomoz.org/articles/searc...ng-factors.php

Lots of times in webmaster/SEO forums, you see someone posting a "Help! My site got dropped from Google" thread.

Most forum administrators know what constitutes "blackhat" search engine optimization techniques, and most of them avoid them. The potential penalties of getting your site dropped from a major search engine's index simply aren't worth the traffic you may gain from employing a shady technique.

Nevertheless, sometimes you might be experimenting with a new SEO technique, or sometimes you might have done something inadvertently to your pages that results in your site getting dropped from Google. What to do?

Google's Matt Cutts describes how to request re-inclusion in his blog. Here's a blurb, and a link to the full text below:

Now where should you send a reinclusion request? This has changed in the last few months from an email address to a web form. The best location to go is http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py . You can select “I’m a webmaster inquiring about my website” and then select “Why my site disappeared from the search results or dropped in ranking.” Click Continue, and on the page that shows up, make sure to type “Reinclusion Request” in the Subject: line of the resulting form. Upper- or lower-case doesn’t matter, but make sure you use the words “reinclusion request” in the subject line so it gets routed to the right place.

Full text: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/reincl...request-howto/

Good white paper from Yahoo on how RSS is entering the mainstream. RSS offers numerous opportunities for clean, ethical SEO and information-sharing. However, it seems like its barely scratched the mainstream, especially in regard to forums.

Here's a blurb, and a link to the full PDF file below.

The use of RSS in web sites is becoming more common, but very few Internet users are aware of it. Recent research conducted by Ipsos Insight among the U.S. online population reveals that many use RSS unknowingly via personalized start pages and browser-based experiences.

Content aggregators and publishers are positioned to benefit from RSS.

Full PDF file: http://publisher.yahoo.com/rss/RSS_whitePaper1004.pdf

Aaron Wall (SEOBook) has a pretty good interview with Google's Matt Cutts here. Nothing particularly earth-shattering, but he hints at a few of the deeper technologies that would be helpful for people interested in SEO to study.

Another gem from Google search engineer Matt Cutts's blog:

moving to a new web host

Tips for moving to a new webhost, and for moving to a different domain while preserving search engine rank. Most of this is standard stuff (although it's still a relief to see it verified from Google). Interesting info includes some details on checking time-to-live DNS info, some minor Google Dance history tidbits, and a recommendation to do 301 redirects for every page on your old domain, if switching to a new one.

Excellent resources.