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No matter what you need help with as a webmaster, there are many forums out there where people are always willing to lend a helping hand or point you in the direction.

Webmaster forums are essential to, especially where new webmasters are concerned, to learn about all the following and much more:

• search engines - Google, Yahoo, MSN/Live, Hotbot, Lycos
• pay per click advertising
• search and internet marketing
• search engine optimisation
• link development
• website promotion
• affiliate marketing
• payment processing
• legal issues
• buying domain names
• business services
• website design
• graphics and multimedia
• content management
• programming
• PHP, ASP, Javascript, HTML, CSS, ColdFusion, XML
• databases including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server

Here we have listed the 10 best & most popular webmaster forums your should visit:

• Digital Point Forums
• UK Webmaster World
• Webmaster Talk
• Iwebtool Forums
• Sitepoint Forums
• Devhunters
• Iguides Forums
• Qdoos Forum
• Webdev Forums
• TriPHP Forums

Although it may be a little disorienting when first visiting any large forum, the time it takes to get used to the forum environment and social atmosphere is always well worth registering to become a member.

If you have a service that you are willing to sell, 99% of webmaster forums allow you to market your service absolutely free.

If you need to sell private ads on your website or buy advertising, forums are also usually the best place to do so.

To use forums to your best advantage, it is important that you make your writing concise when creating a thread or posting while remaining very informative. If you have something to offer or something that you need help with, tell it like it is.

Although the “bait and switch” method will get many people to read your thread, most people will be turned off by your deceptiveness and will in every likelihood lose any further interest in what you wanted to communicate to them.

Many forums also offer various tools to webmasters.

Because there are so many different ranking systems currently used to rank websites based on various criteria, it would take five or six different toolbars to get every popular ranking metric displayed in your browser.

By using an in-browser web tool, you can easily check multiple rankings for each site at the same time. More than that, some web tools provide more data even than what is shown by various ranking metrics.

One important tool for webmasters is a backlink checker. A backlink checker generally is a tool that combines the information provided by major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

In addition, the Iwebtool Forums provides a tool called the PageRank Prediction tool. Although this tool isn’t totally accurate, it does a good job at representing trends in Google PageRank for various websites.

Webmaster resources are also available in the form of free content for your website. However, free content is an area of webmaster resources that is good to have a fair level of scepticism about.

Many sites that offer resources such as free templates will sneak in scripts that allow them to display advertising on your website. Although this would be fine if they explained it to you beforehand, many times webmasters unknowingly are placing advertising scripts on their own sites and earning other webmasters money.

There are also plenty of “free article” websites where you have access to hundreds of articles that you can use wherever you want, with the asking of only a single backlink to the author in return.

Although the articles may be well written, it is best to avoid copying and pasting free articles onto your website; search engines are known for being very harsh against websites that use duplicate content and this could lead to your very own website being penalised in many a search engines results.

Just remember that as a webmaster, you aren’t on your own. There are thousands upon thousands of people just like you looking for answers and services including and not limited to all of the aforementioned.

If you run a business online selling products, it is imperative that you have an eCommerce software solution (shopping cart software) at your website to ensure your buyers have a smooth shopping experience ensuring all transactions are processed seamlessly.

As with any line of business, it is imperative for your “online shop” to stand out from the rest in a professional way.

With so many run of the mill eCommerce packages readily available on the web today, finding the most professional solution can oftentimes be difficult. Especially if you are on a relatively tight budget. This is where Boss Cart comes into play.

The Boss Cart software is more than just your typical average shopping cart software. You can design your own shop and layout through a visual WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, ensuring that your visual design will not be similar to any other website.

With Boss Cart you also need not worry about the size of your business and how many products you sell as the Boss Cart shopping software has an extensive product catalogue allowing you to upload up to 30,000 products!

Payments can be accepted through any popular method including both PayPal and credit card.

One feature that really brings Boss Cart to the forefront of shopping cart technology are the search engine friendly pages that are created by the shopping cart system.

Many shopping cart’s pages today are often not indexed by search engines as they have too many variables and strings added to the URL making this difficult for the major search engines to crawl.

With Boss Cart creating pages that are friendly to search engines, you are also increasing your website’s product visibility so when users search for your product/s you have a greater chance of having targeted traffic being driven to your site directly from search engines.

Free search engine traffic will also enable you to save money that would otherwise go towards revenue being spent on advertising or Pay Per Click campaigns.

Additionally, with Boss Cart, you don’t have to worry about the painstaking process of installing a search function on your site as it comes with one straight out of the box.

If you are just starting out and have very limited funds available to purchase the affordable shopping cart software of the regular version of Boss Cart, you need not worry. Boss Cart still has an option for you with its free shopping cart.

Boss Cart offers the JV version (Joomla Virtual mart) of their software totally free of charge.

Once you have your online store up and running and earning revenue, when you are ready, you can upgrade from the free JV version to the more in-depth paid version of Boss Cart.

If you are running a large business with 1000’s of products, you could stick with the regular paid version of Boss Cart. However, there is now an even better version available, known as Boss Cart Premium.

The Boss Cart Premium system has been designed to make your shopping cart a “stroll in the park”, with very little maintenance required.

For large businesses this is a very worthwhile and valuable investment as it can save you time and effort leaving you to concentrate on other business tasks at hand.

Whether your site is just starting out with no visitors, or if it is a decade old and gets thousands upon thousands of visitors per month, one of the three main versions of Boss Cart will be sure to meet your needs.

If you’ve owned a website for a while, you’ve probably heard the phrase “Alexa Rank”.

Although you wouldn’t guess it from the name, the Alexa ranking system is one that ranks every website on the Internet in order of traffic.

Each day, every website is ranked – the website with the most traffic is ranked first, the website with the second most traffic is ranked second, etc.

Unlike the Google PageRank system, you actually want your Alexa score to be lower, rather than higher.

A website’s Alexa rank is based off of traffic. However, it’s not just pure hits that boost your score, otherwise it would be very easy to game the system by refreshing your browser a few hundred times each day.

The Alexa score metric is actually a triad of three items: number of hits, number of visits, and number of unique visitors.

Although the number of hits and visits are important, the only way to effectively improve your Alexa score is by driving a constant stream of unique visitors to your website each day.

Each visitor is counted as a unique visitor to your website once each twenty-four hours, so it is in your best interest to have a constant stream of visitors to your site each day, possibly by keeping a constant stream of fresh content.

If you spend much time exploring Alexa’s official website, you may notice that each website has three different Alexa rankings. It may look confusing, but each number actually has a logical explanation.

First of all, each website has a “three month ranking”. This ranking is the most important, and is what will show up on various web-info toolbars.

As you would expect, the three-month ranking is an average of a website’s traffic ranking over the past three months.

For a new website, this will usually start out at around the seven million mark and then work its way down from there with a steady flow of traffic.

Secondly, there is the weekly ranking. The weekly ranking, as you probably guessed, is an average traffic rank for your site based off of the past seven days.

The best use for this data is determining if a current marketing strategy is working, and for evaluating concentrated trends in traffic flow.

Thirdly, there is the daily ranking.

For the majority of websites on the net, the daily ranking will display as “N/A” – this is because a daily ranking is only assigned to the top 100,000 websites on the internet.

The daily traffic ranking is more of a novelty, so don’t worry if one isn’t displayed for your website.

There is a small bit of controversy surrounding the Alexa ranking system. Although the people behind Alexa do their best to count traffic as accurately as possible, their sources are limited.

For the most part, only people surfing the net with the Alexa toolbar installed in their browser will be counted towards the Alexa ranking metric.

If you don’t have the Alexa toolbar yet, it is worthwhile to consider installing it. By doing so, your surfing habits will be reflected across the rankings of both your own and other websites you visit.

Furthermore, the toolbar can display the Alexa traffic ranking at the bottom of each page, which allows you to quickly make judgments about a website. (i.e: do I want to buy an ad here? Is this website fairly well known?).

To install the toolbar, head over to Alexa’s website (www.alexa.com) and click on the “Alexa Toolbar” heading at the top of the page. At this point, it will automatically display the appropriate toolbar for your browser.

The latest version of the classic “Alexa Toolbar” for Internet Explorer, or “Sparky” if you are using Mozilla’s Firefox browser.

From there, all you have to do is install the respective version of the toolbar, and you’re all set!

Because the Alexa toolbar is more common among people who own their own website, many webmaster or technology related websites have an innate advantage over those of more “classic” topics such as sewing or cooking type websites.

Although you should not use the Alexa ranking score as your sole source of monitoring traffic trends, it is a very useful source to see how your website fares in comparison to others in your own niche.

Google the search engine discussed on forums by members and individuals alike.

Sounding on the lips with tips and tricks.

Some beginners and newbie’s pull out the dirty tricks, hide it, slide it, white font it and ride it. Skip it!

When is the next pagerank update I hear it sound, did it happen, we’re in progress, my pagerank went down boo hoo yoo with Google ranking, skanking, sinking and linking.

Thread it, post it, host it and roast it - what are you talking about, you know nothing man, yeah I do, no you don’t.

Causing strife to my wife living my life with Google, let it go, let it goo, let it go go go Google.

Google it, Frugal it, love it, hate it. Rate it, link bait it.

The billions and skillions that ride on Google make ya and and break ya. Grrrrrr!

What keywords to use, need some help to select but told of one word that remains true PATIENCE!

Where did my website go, it was there a moment ago. SERPs were good and now it’s gone.

Somebody help me oh why why why I scream out loud at Google search.

The storm came before the calm, my site is back ranking and SERP’ing as it previously did.

Welcome to my moment of madness…… make what you will for all have their own experiences that somewhat differ in the world of Google!

Author: vicdigi – member of the following forums:
UK Webmaster World, Digital Point, Qdoos, Directory Junction, Dev Hunters, Iguides, Iwebtool, Webmaster-Talk, TriPHP and many more.