• Any page that has a link to your site and is indexed and not intentionally blocking the link is a backlink.
• Only nofollow links don’t help with SERPS all others are useful to varying degrees.
• Not all forums use nofollow.
• How the search engine spider know the link as a comment or forum signature? A link is just a link to the SE spiders.
• Search engines aren’t stupid. Indexing and organizing billions of pages everyday shows they have the ability to discern quite a bit about the pages they index.
• Google will not penalize you for having signature links. If it did I’d be banned 100 times over.
• Google doesn’t recognize a page as a forum. They only see it has a page. It has no more or less weight then any other page.
• If that page isn’t relevant to your site, the links won’t mean much. Plus with their being so many links on a forum page there will be little PR sent your way as well.
• Why wouldn’t I put my links in my signature? I don’t post here for the signature links, though. I post to help others and learn and using my signature is a great bonus. Especially when you are approaching 19,000 posts.
• Just keep in mind that although the quantity of backlinks may increase from forum signatures, the quality of backlinks you have won’t has forum sig links aren’t worth much to the search engines.
• Forum signature links have little SEO value. The pages are usually off-topic, PR is diluted to the point of virtual uselessness, and you can be sure having 15,000 links from the same domain is devalued. Signatures are best used to drive traffic to your websites and hopefully from there you can get backlinks from other webmasters because they like your content.
• Forum signatures and most directory links have extremely little SEO value. They’re just about as low quality as it gets.
• Forum signature links send almost no PR due to the low PR of the pages and countless links on them.
• Forum signature links definitely are not quality links.
• The links themselves don’t have a lot of SEO value is the point. I get plenty of traffic from my signature as well. And if your sitepoint sig provides most of your traffic you really need to start promoting your website!
• Forum signatures have very little value. But they do have some value. I wouldn’t go joining lots of forums for the sake of getting your links in your signatures. It’s not worth the effort. Participate in forums related to your topics and participate intelligently. Yes, you’ll get some links out of it, but the effect they have from that perspective will be minuscule compared to the traffic you get from members who appreciate your intelligent posts and want to see what you’ve got going on.
• For me forum sig links are a bonus for participating in a forum. It definitely isn’t the reason why I join a forum and post.
• Posting in forums for the sake of getting backlinks through signatures is a waste of time. The links have such little value that the ROI is just awful. But if you participate in forums then you should take advantage of your signature as you can get decent traffic and maybe even find others wanting to link to you because they like your site.

Traffic is key to any successful website right? For a website to be successful it needs quality return traffic. It’s not that easy to get returning visitors to your website without offering something special, providing a special or up to date content.Some important tips you can use to keep your website visitors coming back are.

1) Offer free tips and ideas about your industry with free articles.
2) Free tools related to your industry like calculators etc.
3) Free newsletter subscription services.
4) Free initial consulting about your industry.
5) Useful resource links.
6) Free products such as eBooks.

These are just a few things you can give away. You can use many different gifts to get new and returning visitors. This could be considered a form of link baiting.

Here is a eBook you can offer for free on your site to see if you can generate some buzz about your site and get some traffic.

Download your free seo secrets eBook

Among all the different search engine optimization (SEO) strategies, writing and submitting articles remains the best strategy. This article outlines the key reasons why articles are the most powerful SEO tool.

1. Article writing is powerful in SEO because it allows you to use many keywords and phrases that apply to your niche. If you know all your essential keywords, you can use them in your articles. The articles you distribute that have your keywords will get picked up by search engines such that when people surfing the Internet type in these keywords, your website comes up. You can rank high on search engines for all your keywords through the articles that you write and distribute on the Internet.

2. Article writing brings life long results in SEO. All the articles that you write are stored and archived on the directories in which they are published. This means that all your articles can be read by anyone and can still drive traffic to your website. Unlike other tools of driving traffic to your website, articles bring long term results.

3. Articles create many back links to your website, which improves your website popularity rank and ultimately drives large volume of traffic to your website. If you write high quality articles, your articles will get published by many websites and e-zines, hence increasing back links to your website. Having many links pointing back to your website is important as it improves the position of your website on search engines.

4. Articles are an affordable SEO tool. Writing and submitting articles is not expensive. You can write your own articles or you can hire a ghostwriter. You can manually submit your articles or you can use some software to automatically submit your article to many directories. Generally, use of articles to improve your position on search engines is not expensive and anyone can afford it.

Writing and submitting articles is clearly the best strategy for improving the ranking of your website on search engines. If you want to succeed in SEO, it is important that you write and submit more articles.

You can quickly re-write chunks of text using Google translators. Simply copy and paste the text you want to rewrite and translate it the following way:

English ==> Spanish ==> German ==> Russian ==> English

You should end up with the same meaning but different wording and therefore look unique in the eyes of search engines. You might want to quickly proofread the final result to make sure everything still makes sense.

This method would be best used with PLR (Private Label Rights) articles that are fairly long. This concept would not be useful if applied to short articles, those are best written yourself.

These Meta tags are not visible when someone browses your web page but the search engines read these Meta tags alone and decide the place of a web page on its search result pages. It does so by finding the relevance of the Meta tags within them and with its contents. The most important Meta tags are the title, description and keywords. The first thing a search engine looks for is to find a relevance in these meta tags by looking at the keywords used in them and secondly it looks the relevance of the keywords used in these meta tags with the contents of the page.

The Title Tag
The title is the most important Meta tag of your website. This is the first thing shown on a web page and this is visible to both your visitor and most importantly to the search engine. That’s why it has to be given the utmost importance while search engine optimization is the consideration.

It is always depicted on the left top bar of in the browser window. This tag should include the most relevant keyword about your business. If the most relevant keywords are used in here, your web site will sure get a boost in a search.

Most websites use their company name in the title which in fact, is not something desirable. Because, nobody usually searches for a company name unless it is very well known or some giant multinational.

The perfect title tags should be something between 10-70 characters. It is not so that one can not put a longer title but the search engine would ignore the longer part of the title.

The Title tag should be written for the visitors (people searching for your business or services) first and the search engines second. This should be such as to motivate a click and obviously to favor the search engine indexing too.

Different title tags should be assigned to each page of your website containing its own keywords that relate to that specific page.

Description tag
The description tag should be written in such way that it speaks about the website contents in just one or two sentences.

It should be short and clear that your visitors get a close idea about your site by reading this in a short time.

The description tag should be 100 to 200 characters long. The Meta description tag also has a great role in the SEO of your page. This tag displays the information at a search engine result page (SERP) after a search is performed by a user. So, this should be such as this puts the concise summary of your page. Most search engines truncate longer Description. Remember this while writing this tag.

Same as above every page should have a different description tag in accordance with the contents it holds. This tag has quite some effect on the ranking of your site in Search Engine results. The Search Engine will read your description tag and will check if the keywords or search terms match your title tag and content of your web site. My suggestion is to take the first sentence or two of the contents from your web page and use that for the Meta description content.

Include the most relevant sentences matching with the page contents in description tag instead of stuffing the tag with more keywords. Remember that the Meta Description Tag of a web page must not look just a bunch of keywords, but should contain an informative and concise summary of your web page.

Keywords Tag
The most heavily sought technique in Search Engine Optimization process is Keyword optimization. But at the same time if keywords are too often repeated, chances are that the site gets marked out as “spam”. However, if your target keyword are not included enough, its ranking will not be optimized. So, with present algorithms which are really smart and intelligent include only those relevant keywords you want to target and make sure that these are included in the contents too.

Use variations of a keyword like watch, watches, wrist watch etc. They are slightly changed keywords and yet don’t render any feeling to the search engine for their being repeated in the tag.

Geographical information (name of the country, city or place) may be used in the keywords. Sometimes it plays a great role when a search is made for a location based business. Or, even brand names, model name of a product can be used in this tag. That also helps when a search is made for a specific product model or brand.

Search engines give different weights to the keywords according to their positions in HTML tags used in the content. For example if a keyword is used in this tag which is present in Heading Tag also has more weight particularly when the same is in H1 tag.

Write your Alt tags of the images and the text links being used in the page such that it includes at least one keyword from the keyword tag. But, remember the same should look just relevant with the image or the hyper link for which it has been written.

The content should have included all of your keywords. The aggregate keyword density (all the keywords used in keyword tag) should be between 20% to 30% but not less than 5% to the best optimized results. However, Density for a single keyword should not be less than 2% and higher than 6%. The best is about 5% with the major keywords and 2% with subsequent keywords.

The Meta tags should be fine tuned with the contents and a good relevance is brought about between themselves with a perfect balance between the target audience and the search engines.

These Meta tags have been used really very un-carefully by the spammers, if we commit to use them methodically with the due respect, I hope, we should be able to create ever increasing web traffic on our sites.