He said he would award each student five marks provided that he talks about an interesting topic, presents it in a good way and get everyone engaged.

I had thought I’d talk about the elections or economic crisis but I didn’t want to dive into arguments (actually I did in the end). After hearing my report, the tutor said I did great and he liked it. I talked about how students could make use of the Book Search service that Google provides.

He wanted me to talk about it more though and how it works but I just didn’t want to sound so geeky. I admit I’m passionate about technology but there are some people who don’t appreciate technology and they drive me nuts. Whenever I talk about anything tech, they stare at me and give me the wrong impression.

Some even go and ask me to stop talking about tech because they already know I love it. I just wonder why they talk to me in the first place if they already know I love tech. Hell, get off my face and don’t be my friend.

The bottom line is: If you are geeky and people criticize you, tell them to fuck off and keep talking about what you love.

Adam,

The number on reason I joined OleOle was that I liked the concept - a social media platform for soccer fans. Hows that? Alright, think of it like Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, Flikr, Wordpress, vBulletin and every other single Web 2.0 feature all combined in one platform.

Like Facebook, because it allows you to create your own profile, invite, search & make friends. Like Wikipedia, because it allows you start, edit and update Wiki articles on clubs, players and stadiums. You guessed it, like YouTube because you can upload & watch videos…..and so on.

Its blogging platform is absolutely amazing. In my humble opinion, it is less buggy than Blogger, but it is not better than Wordpress. However, it offers the basic functionality that every blogger needs to run a SUCCESSFUL blog.

Another aspect of OleOle that no other site has ever thought of is the Match Center where you can do a live commentary on a match, chat with other fans, upload photos & videos while following the game.

Live Scores are continuously updated. Fixtures, Results & Table Data. All taken care of.

OleOle also offers widgets for webmasters. Those widgets bring data from OleOle to your site. Also there are the OleOle Google Gadgets where I’m using on iGoogle. It does the same thing and it saves me a lot of time. With just one click I get to know whom my team will play next weekend and our position on the table - awesome!

I’m very happy to work at OleOle & I would love to take on more tasks especially in the SEO & Marketing department so my passion with soccer would connect with my passion for search.

If you are a soccer fan, give OleOle a try and you won’t be disappointed.

Italy is known to be a beautiful country. A country where everything is satisfactory, you enjoy your life in all of its aspects. The best food, the finest wine, the latest fashion and the romantic atmosphere, but let me tell you something, yes La Bella Vita is somehow in Italy, but there are disadvantages too.

Lets talk about yours truly. I’m a crazy 20 year old geek. I’m gung ho about technology and I love Linguistics. I studied in North Africa pretty most of my academic life and I’m now in Italy. Italy has the oldest and most prestigious universities in the world but yet there are still problems for us, kids.

Italian students graduate when they turn 25 or 26 due to the education system probably and will then can’t compete with foreigners especially in competitive markets. There is nothing wrong with the education, but I’ve heard (from a lot of people) that Italy is not the good place to grow academically and professionally.

Another disadvantage of not living in the US, and living in Italy is opportunites. The Technology sector in Italy is pretty poor, Italy is way too behind rest of Europe in terms of Internet usage and this has its negative impact on the country and the people.

My awesome friend Joe has recently blogged about the TechCrucnh event he attended. I commented on his post and said that I had always wanted to go to meetups and conferences. There are a few here in Italy, but not as mush as in the US. You may say, that’s normal because Technology is being invented in the US, but how about countries like Engalnd, Ireland…etc? Cmon Italia..

It is really frustrating being isolated from a technological inviroment. That’s why I’m considering moving to the US but I know it won’t be easy. I don’t know if I should complete college here or in the US or back in NA. In Italy it is pretty expensive to study as much as in the US, …. and in North Africa, well not that expensive, but in places like Cairo, Tripoli, Tunis and Algeria it is pretty expensive yeah.

That’s being said, I’d love to move to the US one day. I guess I have to continue growing both academically and professionally first, then go for a little trip to see things how work, and maybe some folks would hire me, yeah these sort of things happen in life, I mean I have been to more than three job interviews here in Rome in a short period of time, but the school thing and the low salaries weren’t on my side. Nevertheless, I love being here, Italy is awesome.

Any advice guys?

I think I should ask for some “experts‘” opinions on this, because I’ve never tried such thing. I’ll have to do some homework before, so the whole thing becomes a success

Any thoughts, folks?

This is what I experience most of the time. At college, when somebody asks me about what I do, and I say “I’m a Search Marketing Consultant” (I don’t even say I’m an SEO because I don’t want to confuse them more) they just stare at me and say “what the hell is that”?

So I just start explaining the whole thing and most of the time they don’t understand it. Is it because SEO is so geeky or just a weird job? Some of my family members think that I work for Google which is really funny.

Is it about the concept of SEO? The acronyms and terms? Or it is just because our job is not classified as a job in the first place?

I just thought I would share with you the five funny SEO myths/tips that I used to believe in.

1- Put your targeted keyword in the meta keyword tag and there you go …. ranking on Google’s first page for that term.
2- Link to Yahoo twice and Microsoft three times as linking to trusted sites makes Google trusts you.
3- All links are equal; a link from BBC is the same as a link from your girldfriend’s blog (unless your girlfriend is Paris Hilton, this is not correct).
4- Stuffing keywords in the title tag is a wise idea which will help your rankings.
5- Keyword research is unnecessary. Just target the keyword you think people would search for.

As you can see, those tips are nonsense. I think If I thought about SEO logically, I wouldn’t believe in this stuff.

Anyway, I would love to hear from you. Have you ever believed in SEO myths? What were they?

I started digging in Google search results and I found several articles about how to choose brandable and good domain names. Rand Fishkin has an articled titled “12 Rules for Choosing the Right Domain Name“. Also, Darren, the ProBlogger, has an interesting article on brandable vs keyword-rich domains. I recommend you read both of them, and here is my two cents on choosing domain names.

1- If possible go with keyword-rich domains. Having your targeted keyword in your domain name will increase your chances of having relevant anchor texts and people who hear about your site will directly associate it with its content.

2- Never use hyphens. I was guilty of this and I’ve learned my lesson. You have to make it easy for people to remember your domain name and having hyphens can confuse them.

3- Choose a name that represents your goals. For example, I chose SEO Gladiator because my goal is to be a professional SEO. Darren chose ProBlogger because he is a professional blogger - I think you get the point.

4- Ask for people’s opinions. When I was naming this blog, I contacted a lot of friends for their opinions. They were all kind and gave me valuable suggestions. Their inputs really helped me a lot.

It isn’t easy, so you need to do a lot of research, brainstorming and asking a lot of people. In the end, you will have a domain name that will make your business successful.

I would love to hear your feedback on this topic. What is your experience with domain names and do you have more useful tips?

In this post, I’m going to share my experience with Vbulletin, the most popular forum software on the web, but you can also apply these tips to any other forum softwares just with more thinking and work.

On-Page Optimization

Duplicate-Content
Duplicate-content is a serious issue and often neglected by many forum owners, and therefore their sites may struggle to rank in the search engines.
The problem is that your threads are accessible both to search bots and visitors by different links. While users might be fine with this, search engines are not, because they want to keep their index clean and only have one original version of each document.

To solve this issue, you have to do a redirection using the .htaccess file which is in your site’s root. 301 redirection will redirect all pages on the non-www (sitename.com) version to the other one (www.sitename.com) or vice versa depending on which version you want to use.

Add the following lines to your .htaccess file and remember to change “sitename” to your domain name.
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^sitename.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.sitename.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ http://www.sitename.com/ [R=301,L]

URLs
Although many SEOs believe that descriptive links have no direct effect on ranking, I believe it is useful to have keywords in them. People who would link to your threads might not use relevant anchor texts but rather copy and paste the links . If your links are the VB’s default which has numbers and irrelevant, duplicated keywords, then you are missing on a huge potential of relevance and search traffic.

It is not just useful for SEO, but it is also useful to users as they can guess what the thread content is about from the link. So there is no harm to have descriptive urls.

With Vbulletin, there are two plugins that can do the job. One is VbSEO which is a paid one and is also supported (It has also many other SEO options) and ZointsSEO which is free but can do the job.

If you are willing to pay 149 bucks for VbSEO then go for it, if not, ZointSEO is the solution.

Once you install ZointsSEO, it will automatically modify the templates and fix all the links to the new ones. Just remember to 301 redirect the old ones to the new ones from ZointsSEO’s options in ACP. You can download and fine more information on this plugin here.

Title Tags
Titles are the most important element of OnPage SEO and therefore they can bring a lot of traffic if they are properly optimized and when the overall site is in a good shape.

Edit your style and remove the “powered by Vbulletin” phrase and also the forum name in thread titles (keep the sub-forums and threads titles) You can leave the forum name if branding is needed, but I prefer to have it removed.

In Vbulletin you can do this by removing “$vboptions[bbtitle]” from the title tag in your templates. For example, If I’m going to remove my forum name from the thread titles I would go to the “showthread” template, look for the title tag and remove that phrase. The same applies to other templates such as forumdisplay, memberlist …etc

Meta Description Tags
When you use VBSEO or Zoints SEO you will have the chance to write a unique description for each forum. As for threads the plugin will show the first 25 words from the thread’s content. Make sure you write good descriptions that will attract searchers from the search results.

Internal link structure
You have to improve your internal linking structure. If you have your forum in a sub-directory and VBadvanced in the root, add links of your main forum sections to the navigation so spiders can reach the content easily.

Also you should nofollow any links that lead to pages you don’t want to rank in search engines such as about us, privacy or anything that you don’t want to rank.

Robots.txt
There are pages such as member lists, calender, register, new posts…etc that must not be indexed. By not allowing spiders to index them your rankings will improve and the engines will crawl your other forum pages faster. To do this, copy and paste the following lines into your robot.txt file

User-agent: *
Disallow: /forum/ajax.php
Disallow: /forum/attachment.php
Disallow: /forum/calendar.php
Disallow: /forum/cron.php
Disallow: /forum/editpost.php
Disallow: /forum/global.php
Disallow: /forum/image.php
Disallow: /forum/inlinemod.php
Disallow: /forum/joinrequests.php
Disallow: /forum/login.php
Disallow: /forum/member.php
Disallow: /forum/memberlist.php
Disallow: /forum/misc.php
Disallow: /forum/moderator.php
Disallow: /forum/newattachment.php
Disallow: /forum/newreply.php
Disallow: /forum/newthread.php
Disallow: /forum/online.php
Disallow: /forum/poll.php
Disallow: /forum/postings.php
Disallow: /forum/printthread.php
Disallow: /forum/private.php
Disallow: /forum /profile.php
Disallow: /forum/register.php
Disallow: /forum/report.php
Disallow: /forum/reputation.php
Disallow: /forum/search.php
Disallow: /forum/sendmessage.php
Disallow: /forum /showgroups.php
Disallow: /forum/subscription.php
Disallow: /forum/threadrate.php
Disallow: /forum/usercp.php
Disallow: /forum/usernote.php

Bonus tip
Vbulletin styles by default have no external CSS files, and every time a browser requests a forum page, it reads the CSS data from the html. You should export your CSS to an external file so the forum gets faster.

To do that, make sure that /clientscript/vbulletin_css directory is chmod 777 so the stylesheet files can be created.
Next, in the AdminCP, select the vBulletin Options menu then vBulletin Options. Select Style and Language Options. Set “Store CSS Stylesheets as Files?” to Yes.
Click Submit.

Everyone will appreciate that your forum opens fast.

Off-page Optimization
Improving the on-page SEO of your forum is great, but If your site is not trusted enough in the search engines you won’t get a lot of traffic. Attracting links to your forum is quite hard and probably having a blog and some linkable content can help build links (that needs another post).

Domain age also plays an important role in ranking. I have done on-page SEO for a forum of a friend of mine who had a 2 year old domain and couple of hundreds of links and he started to receive nice traffic. I guess you get my point.

This is all of what I know about SEO for forums and I think I’ve covered the most parts that you should take care of. However, I would love to hear your feedback and comments. Please, If I missed something or you have an another point of view on something, post in the comments. Also, if you have any questions feel free to ask in comments.

After weeks of research and brainstorming as well as asking for advice, I have found the best name for this blog - SEO Gladiator.

What helped me to choose the most appropriate name is that I wrote down on a paper what I wanted this blog to represent. You might be asking, what the hell he wanted this damn blog to represent? Alright, here goes…

1- I wanted to have a place where I publish articles on search engines and blogging (plus personal but related stuff - ).
2- A place which would provide an opportunity to network with like-minded individuals and meet new cool people.
3- A place where I showcase my skills and build a portfolio for my consulting services.

And since there are SEO ninjas, I thought it would be cool to be a SEO Gladiator. Gladiator is an ancient Roman warrior who fought other warriors in a large theater full of people. Does it make sense? I guess so…

Anyway, I would like to thank Rand, Jane, Rebecca, Darren, Aaron, Mauro and everyone else who gave me their advice and suggestions. Thanks so much guys!.

This is just my first post. I will try to get to a posting schedule starting from next week.