Have you ever wondered how successful bloggers and other Web sites attract visitors and get indexed in search engines? In many cases, they are practicing effective SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SMO (Social Media Optimization) techniques. If you are creating a public group on Gather and are interested in developing a following on the Web, you can do this too by following a few simple steps when you make decisions about how to set up and manage your Gather Group.
In order for your group to be successful and see active traffic, you’ll want to focus on two critical ideas: (1) making your group relevant and (2) making your group important, as defined for SEO.
- Relevance -- Relevance is determined by the keywords found on the homepage and content published to the group. You can create relevance by choosing keywords that are often searched for on the Web at search engines and do not have strong competition.
- Importance -- Importance is determined by the search engines and affects how your site is ranked in search results. Factors most influencing importance are the quality and quantity of links pointing to your group domain URLs. As your groups importance rises, you can then target higher volume keywords.
This series of articles describes a process for creating and maintaining your group or blog in order to maximize relevance and increase importance. Group optimization involves the following high-level steps:
Group Setup
Learn how to set up your group to be competitive on your chosen topic. learn more
Group Layout and Theme Choices
See which Gather group presentation options can be helpful for SEO. learn more
Group Content Seeding
Think through your content development strategy for your initial launch and beyond. learn more
Group Search Engine and Directory Submission
Get your group indexed in search engines and site directories. learn more
Group Member Recruitment
Tell others about your group and invite them to participate. learn more
Group Link Building
Develop a link building strategy to drive traffic to your site. learn more
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Comments: 9
SEO techniques obviously can be useful for blogs and groups wanting to reach a wider audience. The primary focus of my comment above was not to debate the use of these methods, but to qualify their use in the community by helping to establish reasonable expectations for group owners.
The vast majority of groups in the community would see very little substantive benefit from SEO, regardless of the effort expended...unless a significant portion of that effort was directed at group content/experience.
Jenn,
I just created a group on Gather called Crocheter's Network. It is designed to help those who want to make their crocheting hobby into a profitable business. I think this article (and the articles herein) would be an excellent asset to my group members. If you would be so kind as to post this to Crocheter's Network I will be more than happy to feature it. If you have any other suggestions for group content I would love to see them as well.
great info