February 24, 2008
Forums as a whole have become extremely popular on the Internet within the past few years, to the point which most websites include some sort of forum, be it a support forum for a product, or simply a general discussion forum. Some of this software requires a paid paid license, while others remain free.
Vbulletin:
The forum software Vbulletin is arguably the most popular of all the paid forum solutions, despite the fact that a license is rather pricey. The cost of a single year license currently sells for $85 per year, and a lifetime license costs $160. There is also an additional price of $30 per year to cover updates. The software is made in PHP, and uses MYSQL for the database storage.
The continued popularity of Vbulletin can at least be partially attributed to the wide range of features, in addition to a large skinning and modding community .Possibly the biggest downside to Vbulletin besides the license fee is the fact that it is harder to make and fix skins and mods than with some of the competing software packages.
Invision Power Board:
Another popular piece of forum software is the Invision Power Board by IPS. The software itself has been coded in PHP, and most commonly uses MYSQL for database storage, although other database engines are now available.
Like with Vbulletin, Invision Power Board requires a paid license in order to use. For a regular license the cost is $149, while the business license costs the substantially higher price of $299.99.When Invision first launched however, a free version was maintained for the first few years until Invision decided to become pay only. Despite this, there exists a number of free forum hosting websites offering a free version of Invision Power Board based off of Version 1.3 which was the last free version before Invision discontinued the free line of software. The community for modifications is also very large. Generally, Invision is considered to have a lower learning curve than that of Vbulletin.
PHPBB:
PHPBB is a free forum software package, and possibly the most popular forum software in existence. The first public release of PHPBB debuted in the summer of the year 2000, making it one of the oldest forum software packages still being developed. With the release of PHPBB Version 2.0 in April of 2002 however, that is when the popularity really began to skyrocket. The forum software is now currently in Version 3, although the PHPBB team is committed to offering bug fixes and support for Version 2 for the foreseeable future. Many forum owners continue to run Version 2 over Version 3, citing skin and plugin availability as one of the main reasons.
SMF:
Of the most popular forum software is SMF. This software is often considered the easiest to use Forum for beginners and is rapidly growing in popularity. There is already a large modification community in place, and it has a promising future . Like with PHPBB, SMF is also free to use.
©2007-2008 Kickstartyourforums.com - All Rights Reserved - Do not publish any part of this article without expressed written approval from kickstartyourforums.com
January 25, 2008
Write Page Titles: A page title using under a dozen words without filler such as “the,” “and,”etc will cause search engines to think it’s a hyperlink. By making it intriguing you will encourage searchers to click on the title. The title should be put between the head tags on your page. He words most likely to be searched need to go first, before your company name or website name not the other way around as seems natural.
Write a Description and Meta Data: A couple sentences describing the page content and using the main keywords on the page should be used anything not on the page could hurt you in the long run. Google only ranks the first 60 words although more may be indexed. The Meta tags should be the choice keywords from the page, and although not used by Google are still seen by Yahoo. These should also be placed between the head tags.
Use keywords in Headers and hyperlinks: Words that appear inside header tags are perceived as important by search engines. Including a few keywords in headers increases the chance the get seen. Words used in hyperlinks are considered potentially meaningful. Hyperlinks to pages with keywords in the page name are also seen as more important.
Make Your Navigation Search Engine Friendly: While frames, Flash and JavaScript make for pretty navigation on your site, it’s not easily read by search engines. This doesn’t mean you should throw it out the window, just be sure to include text links for navigation of the main pages somewhere. Also consider a sitemap page and submit it to Google.
Submit to Search Engines: Submit to major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, MSN, and AOL. Look for the “Add your URL” link to submit. Stay away for free for all pages and link farms. The big search engines could penalize you for using such services and the big search engines should cover you.
Submit to Directories and request Reciprocal Links: Submit to key directories and those within your niche. The Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.com) is a great free directory, but don’t be impatient and resubmit or you will be put at the bottom again. Yahoo is another to consider, although the business directory does cost yearly and they may pare down your description before accepting your site. Creating a page for links from other complimentary sites is a great way to increase linkage without drawing people away from your site immediately.
Write Articles or Blog: Writing and submitting articles to editors for use in newsletters or online resources is a great way to get noticed. Ask that a link back to your site is included along with a short description so they know what you do. A blog is a great friendly way to interact with people and reference them to places on your site they can get more information. These are easy to host on your own domain and can gain links from readers.
©2007-2008 Kickstartyourforums.com - All Rights Reserved - Do not publish any part of this article without expressed written approval from kickstartyourforums.com
January 13, 2008
Social Bookmarking is simply put the ability of internet users to store, share and categorize bookmarks of web pages. While most are done publicly many offer features to share only with select people or not at all. There are many of these services and the features offered are continually growing as the public’s usage and needs change.
Social bookmarking has its start in the mid 1990’s with itlist.com being the first known social bookmarking site. Others joined the quickly competitive market, but ultimately went under in the fast dotcom bust due to lack of a viable business plan. In 2003 del.icio.us came online and started the current social bookmarking trend. Many others followed and many websites now offer this function.
Tags are the way bookmarks are categorized and shared. Users define a site with tags or words that are meaningful to the content. Then other users can search tags to find sites that are labeled as relevant. These are often shown in combination with statistics that show how many users found the tags useful. Tags can however sometimes be vague such as “cheese” to encompass the broader category for a site about “muenster” which can lead to issues when there is no way to differentiate between parent categories. Because the tagging is done by users instead of employees it is often abused to increase page ranking and traffic by black hat SEOs.
RSS feeds are offered so that users can be notified of new bookmarks in categories they find interesting. This alerts a user when new bookmarks are saved, shared, and tagged by other users. By doing this a user is able to find more useful bookmarks without spending the time themselves. They are also able to receive new bookmarks that they might not find themselves because they use different search terms or a different search engine.
The good things about social bookmarking include the fact that real people (we assume) are doing the tagging. A real person is much better able to interpret content and categorize it than a computer using an algorithm to try and compute what is going on and relevant to the site. The method of marking a bookmark useful is also incredibly helpful. By assigning a usefulness rating based on the quality of content instead of a generic page ranking based on links pointing back to a page gives users quality sites, not just well marketed ones.
There are drawbacks to social bookmarking. Among them is the ability to skew the usefulness ratings and mistag sites to change the category they are listed in. Since there is no required standard for tagging a site, users may use any capitalization they wish, unclear terms, tags with multiple meaning, as well as misspellings due to carelessness which impact the categorization and meaning of tags. Some SEOs have also taken to tagging a site many times or with terms that are popular even if they don’t fit the site content to get more traffic to their site.
©2007-2008 Kickstartyourforums.com - All Rights Reserved - Do not publish any part of this article without expressed written approval from kickstartyourforums.com
January 9, 2008
Directories are lists of links to different websites, blogs, and online stores. While they may seem confusing they are often an overlooked source of advertising.
Using a directory listing means no fraudulent clicks; instead it will drive all real traffic to your site. Since directories are not affiliate programs or ads the clicks you get from a directory listing are real. They come from people who are truly interested in the niche you are in, and are most likely going to be spending some time on your site, not just clicking through and immediately hitting back when they realize they don’t want to be at your site. The more really organic traffic you get the better off you are as then you won’t have to worry about actual numbers versus reported numbers. You don’t want to worry about getting five hundred clicks and only two hundred being from real people who want to stay more than a few seconds. Full Story »
January 2, 2008
Google Page rank (from here on refered to as PR) and Alexa’s traffic ranking are decided upon with two fundamentally different methods, but both attempt to depict a website’s importance, or popularity. The major difference is that Google shows importance from a webmaster’s point of view, and Alexa shows it from a web surfer’s point of view, as will be further examined.
Google analyses the links pointing back to a particular site in an equation that results in a number on the PR scale. This scale rates sites from one to ten, with a zero meaning that the site has not been ranked yet or else has been penalised for something. Full Story »
December 28, 2007
A good place to begin understanding how to increase one’s page rank with Google is by understanding briefly how it is decided.
Page rank is how Google defines the importance of a website when compared to other websites. By Google’s view, a website is important if it has a lot of links pointing back to it from external sites. But each link back is not viewed as equal-the higher the page rank of the site holding your URL, the more weight, or importance it is given.
Given how page rank is decided, it is clear that the basic way of increasing your page rank is to increase the number of link backs pointing to your site, and there are several ways of doing that. Full Story »
September 11, 2007
Well it was only a matter of time before we began branching out into new services. We have a lot in development phase. Some is just being discussed, others are nearing completion and close to being released onto the mainpage of Kickstart. Its a busy and exciting time for us. We have grown faster than even we expected and can only hope we continue to grow by leaps and bounds. Over the next month we will be rolling out a few new programs that will help webmasters to get their site name and content out on the Internet and will draw in traffic to their site. A few days ago we unveiled our first of many new programs on the way to KYF. You can find it on the left hand side of the mainpage under its own directory table called “Signature Packages”. What makes our signature packages different from anyone else is we send posters out to more sites than any of our competitors. Our minimum plan starts out with 5 different forums and our biggest plan reaches out to 20 different sites. With one poster at each site posting it exposes the clients URL to thousands of people! By targeting forums in the same genre or age group as our clients site we can better the chances of people crossing over and joining up through our signature links. This is a fantastic way for our customers to bring in potential new members! We are excited about this new program and expect it to be very popular with our client base.
We’ve also added a new table on the main page labeled “Add-ons” The first service to be revealed there is something we are calling “Forum Cleansweep”. The purpose of this add-on is to tidy up our clients website. I’ve been an admin for close to 10 years now, if there is one thing I’ve seen that can drive members away is spam, and as an admin I know how time consuming it is to keep up with spammers. This is what led us to our new cleansweep program. We have several people on our team who own and run their own websites and forums. With our admin experience we can easily identify the changes that need to be made around a site and do it. This free’s up the sites owner to focus on other area’s of their site. Full Story »
July 6, 2007
What makes a forum successful? That all depends on what you consider success. Is the forum going to be just for you and your buds, or do you want it to become a multicultural forum? In order to grow and thrive a forum needs constant care and attention.
First up, you need to pick your forum software. There are far too many forum programs to name and they have their pros and cons. In my opinion though, the two front runners are Vbulletin and phpbb. From my experience they are the most diverse and the limits to their capabilities are almost limitless. Take your time and weigh the options each give you before deciding. Full Story »
July 6, 2007
If you’ve purchased a posting package from us in the past and would like to leave a comment in regards to your experience, please do so here. We appreciate any feedback you can give us in regards to the level of service we provided you and your site with and thank you for your patronage with Kickstart your forums. We sincerely hope you choose us for any future projects you may have and welcome any suggestions you may be able to offer us in regards to providing you and others with an overall better experience.
If you choose to leave a comment please leave (at least) the following details.
- Your name (first name only please)
- email address (will only be seen by admins)
- website URL (if you don’t want it listed that’s OK)
- description of the experience you had with us
Best wishes to you and your site and once again, thank you.
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