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[EchelonOne]

Echelon Designers reaches a Google PR4

This week seen Echelon Designers go from a Page Rank of "0" to a "4" and was achieved in just 10 months of being online.

So, you may wonder how we did this in quite a quick timescale, so here's a few of the changes we made to IP.Board to 'streamline' it down a bit to increase page rendering, creating a huge amount of backlinks and of course the most important thing, content.

Some idea's of what we have employed
Firstly, we chose a domain name that had many other variations that were already from well established websites. Choosing the right domain is not simple by a long way and we took a fair few weeks before choosing ours.

The "Do's" and "Dont's"

• One thing to keep in mind when choosing a domain is keep it as short as possible, and at most use only 2 words.
• Research the domain first, check for other sites with high Page Ranks using any word that you want to use.
• Never use numbers within a domain name, this causes confusion to people and may lose you traffic.
• Never use hyphens between words, this also causes confusion to people and possible traffic loss in the long term.
• Never use letters like "xxx", etc or you will end up bringing the wrong traffic to your website.
• Use rewrite rules to stop anyone from not entering the "www." before your domain - this is an internet standard sub-domain that many people do not realize.
• In the first few months concentrate on applying tweaks to the 'vanilla' IP.Board - we use a fair few on here, some are not even publicly viewable and only direct ''spiders' accessing the site.
• Most importantly whichever niche you choose, make sure you have plenty of content which is unique (copying text from other sites can have adverse effects on Page Ranks). Update it frequently.
• Do not submit your site to search engines, a content-less site will not bring in visitors - give yourself time to implement numerous tweaks, these will help you when you are ready to launch.
• IP.Board has many features, but do really need them all enabled? In most cases, disabling features you do not really need will increase page rendering, and lowers your server resources.
• We also employ CDN (Content Delivery Network) technology, this gives us the power to push our content from 12+ servers globally, and also helps with our Page Ranking.
• The latest meta-tag technology is also employed, this ensures the content on the site is read and indexed correctly by search engines, the IP.Board defaults can cause your forum to use out-of-date Directory data which will have an adverse effect in Page Ranks. The meta-tag data we use is listed within this post for your reference and can be used on any website.
• Always keep your meta tag descriptions concise and short, along with the relevant keywords for your niche on your pages.
• Try and make your content original as possible, nobody wants to read the same content they have just read somewhere else.

Now, many people will tell you to become a well established website you need those backlinks, which are just links from many other sites linking back to your own. This is a well-known fact so, getting your backlinks out there is essential, some people post theirs on blogs and forums hoping for better links. We have only posted our url on a few high ranking forums, the rest of our backlinks are auto-generated worldwide, thus increasing our presence daily across the internet which saves us time and money in advertising. We will go in to this in more detail in a future article and show you how easy it is to generate targeted traffic to your forum.

Before I end this post, I mentioned about our updated meta-tags which you can add to your own forum to stop Google reading out-of-date information from directory listings provided by Yahoo or DMOZ, etc. You will need to place these meta-tags in your globalTemplate in whichever skin you use as a default for visitors.

<meta name="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX, FOLLOW" />
<meta name="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="INDEX, FOLLOW" />
<meta name="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP" />
<meta name=”SLURP” CONTENTt=”NOYDIR” />
<meta name=”MSNBOT” CONTENT=”NOODP” />
<meta name=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP, NOYDIR” />

You can check our source code on any page of this forum, and you will see if is setup virtually at the top of all pages. Also note that we have our robots.txt file setup as well, this ensures the above meta data will work correctly.

If you have any questions about anything mentioned in this post just ask, and we will gladly answer.