SEO Forums: The Voice of the Industry - Other Great Forums
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WebMasterWorld.com is more than an SEO forum. Its topics include all facets of website design and development, and it is an industry-leading resource about how to create, maintain and promote your website. Their mission states, "design, coding, maintenance, promotion, marketing, and management of a website is almost an impossible task for one person alone without extensive training. We are here as a forum for the members to share and gain knowledge in operating and promoting a website."
WebMasterWorld.com is one of the few forums that is not free to join. It costs $89 for a six-month membership and $149 for a year. Most industry professionals would agree that membership is well worth it. Some discussion threads are free and some are only accessible to members. You'll get the most benefit from this (or any) forum by submitting your own posts and becoming part of the community.
SEOChat.com's forum is heavily moderated and rife with industry expertise and advice. Full privileges such as posting signatures, rating another user's post, uploading an avatar and other perks are suspended until you've been an active member for 90 days and made 100 posts. The layout of the forums is similar to SEW, with particular attention paid to Google, which has four topics devoted to it. The other top engines all get a piece of the action, with sections on optimization in Yahoo, MSN and AskJeeves. SEOChat.com is an extremely active forum with over 15,000 members, 26,000 threads and nearly 200,000 posts.
"I personally think we have an incredible group of moderators on SEOchat, people I have known since this forum was started little over two years ago," says Ben Pfeiffer, SEOChat Moderator. There are many topics to choose from and moderators take their jobs seriously, so stay on topic and be sure to read the pinned threads before putting yourself in their line of fire.
Conclusion
SEO forums have enabled the search industry to grow exponentially since the time Danny Sullivan launched SearchEngineWatch.com back in 1996. SEO professionals, novices and webmasters can all coalesce in one place and freely exchange ideas and information. This has helped create standards of practice throughout the industry and raised the bar in terms of the quality of service expected by clients, and delivered by professional SEOs. Elisabeth Osmeloski, Forums Editor for SearchEngineWatch.com, says it best.
"SEO is largely a self-taught skill, and particularly before SEM conferences and seminars came along, you relied on the experience of others and knowledge sharing that happened within these outlets to learn how to maximize site performance on the SEs. Now, forums are the day to day venue for discussion between conference dates."
What are you waiting for? Go forth and post.
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