Webmaster forums usually have different sections, each focusing on a specific part of running a website, e.g. search engine optimization, advertising, getting business clients offline etc. When you join a website forum, the first thing you need to do is read the rules and regulations posted in the forum by the administrators or moderators. See how you can help others by posting replies and how you can post questions in the categories you need help. Remember, great forums have great communities of people helping each other! (Of course, there could be some off-balanced members who only have unhelpful replies, but even if you encounter those, remember that forums reflect society with both good and bad people.) When seeking answers you can trust, look around for members who have been members for a long time. They are the people who can help you out with your website related questions.

If you search Google for top website webmaster forums, you will find lots of quality community forums. Some general guidelines include picking good user names! If you use “aaabbb” kind of user names that make no sense, you risk getting deleted by moderators who think you are a person getting ready to spam their forum. Picking a good name from the start is also important in building up trust and recognition in a forum community.

To sum up, website forums play an important role in the internet. Besides just getting help with problems, they can also connect you to people who you might want and need to do business with in the future. Buying, selling and trading services is popular in many forums. Such services can include anything from website design, graphic, programming and website promotion. If you are lucky, you might even find people that can help you starting a business or joint venture.

Some of the popular webmaster forums include V7N, Digital Point, Web Help Forums, SEO Chat and SitePoint.

The video demonstrates A1 Sitemap Generator and was made by Tom Edwards. You can check his video marketing website and YouTube video channel for more videos covering various software products and tools.

Website Promotion Is More Than Keywords and Titles.
When customers reach your website, you need to make them interested in your products and make it easy for them to find product information. This also means your website should not scare off potential customers. A clean crisp layout with clear information on your products is a must for getting sales. Take great care in what kind of website and company you have. If you just sell one or two products, your website should look very differently from a general purpose shopping cart website with thousands of products.

Understanding Customer Behavior
Test your website design using website analysis software. See how people navigate and what they search for in your website. Maybe they are searching for something you have, but under a different name? Be sure to test your various website design elements such as logos and headers. Sometimes small changes in website design can yield much better conversion rates.

Provide Contact Information
Many potential customers will look up your contact information. Some just to know you are not a no-name organization, other to actually email or call you with support questions. Be sure to provide contact information in an easy to spot place, e.g. through a prominent link or at bottom of your website pages. This will also help ensure people trust your website.

The Social Factor
Have a good website design with clear information on your products will also increase chances of people bookmarking your website, perhaps even adding it to their favorite social sites such as Twitter. If you have a dull website layout that looks boring and with product information hidden away, chances are your website promotion will fail miserably as well!

Google sitemaps / XML sitemaps
“XML sitemaps” were originally invented by Google. Later on more search engines like Yahoo, Bing and Ask followed and together they all created the shared standard XML sitemaps.

Using XML sitemaps allow you to submit your entire website with all its pages to search engines. this will help them index your content faster (in particular if you make sure not to have lots of duplicate content etc.) and getting more of your website pages into search engine result pages. Google has since then introduced some new XML sitemap formats for specific kinds of content. In particular the following deserves special attention:

• News Sitemaps
• Image Sitemaps
• Video Sitemaps
• Mobile Sitemaps

If your website lends itself well to these kinds of content, you should create the necessary sitemaps for optimal exposure in search engines. Here is one sitemap generator tool that can handle all XML sitemap file kinds.

HTML sitemaps:
These are the standard good old way of createing sitemaps. They help:

• Visitors find important pages in your website.
• Give link juice to important pages you search engines to crawl.

Remember that you can create HTML sitemaps in any tool or server code language. The output is what has to be XHTML or HTML. Doing that, both browsers (with real humans behind) and search engine crawlers can read them.

ATOM and RSS Feeds:
For blogs, forums and related kinds of websites, you will also want look into RSS and ATOM feed files. Many search engines and news aggregation services allow you to submit feed files. These will help you get new pages and posts indexed the same way, if not faster, XML sitemaps do.

If you ever have a question or need help finding a solution, just ask now. Quite often you will get an answer within the same day!

1. Make sure your primary keywords are found in page titles, headers, first in content etc. Research which keywords convert best and are easiest to get top ranking positions in search engines.
2. Keep your website design and navigation simple. Create HTML sitemaps for navigation and XML sitemaps for having search engines crawl and index your website faster.
3. Submit your important pages to popular search engines, website directories, social bookmarks etc. You can hire someone of use semi-automatic tools. Avoid using automated submission for important search engines, directories etc.
4. Used a varied set of website promotion strategies to rank. Just like reciprocal and paid links have been devalued, so may any current search engine optimization strategy. Optimize your pages, link build and keep up to date on search engine algorithms.
5. Monitor your competitors and try to find out how they are ranking higher than you. Incoming links? Redirects from other domains? Better optimized pages? Find out and start ranking higher!
6. Use logs and analytics software to understand where traffic comes from. Analyze your visitor location, if they come from searches or links, which keywords convert to sales etc.
7. Write and submit articles for your website or online magazines. This will help you get perceived as an authority in your field of work.
8. When selling products online, keep everything as simple as possible. No unnecessary sign-up fields or choices. Make the purchase process simple and fast.
9. Consider hiring professionals. It may seem costly, but less expensive than burning your money on a website that has no visits or conversions
10. Always optimize your website. Split test your landing pages. Entice people to link. Offer newsletters, free reports etc. Your website is a sales tool that is always changing.
11. Make sure all page META descriptions are unique and enticing. Search engine often show these in search results. Just like click-through-rate matters in pay-per-click ads, same goes for organic search. Even if you can not improve your position, you may still be able to improve the number of people clicking your listing.