Q&A websites such as FormSpring, Quora, StackOverflow and the new TED Conversations offer a unique way for your company to brand itself using questions your customers ask everyday.  Since you’re already answering these questions, it takes very little effort to archive these, put them into text format and publish them for the rest of the world to see.  These sites can be real timesavers for companies with small customer service departments by acting as a knowledge base that you can direct customers to.

Concerned that these sites may not have relevant categories for questions relating to your industry?  Don’t be.  Our research has shown that almost every industry is covered – everything from sales and marketing to travel, from education to workplace safety.  There’s something for everyone.  And, like I mentioned above, every question/answer you post can be reposted within Facebook, Twitter and other top social sites and can include links to your website or back to the Q&A sites.  This is a great method for developing link popularity and social authority, two primary algorithms used in determining the ranking positions of your keywords.

Several of these platforms also allow for discussions to be carried on further by your viewing audience, which works to your advantage and gives you the ability to interact with industry influencers.

Here’s What You’ll Need to Get Started

Start developing an extensive list of common questions and your responses to those.  If you’re response includes product or service solutions offered by your company, include a relevant link to the product/service on your website.

So, what makes a quality web marketing firm? Well, for most of the SEO Evaluation firms out there it is money. That’s right, the more a marketing firm pays, the better ranked they are and the more they are touted as being one of the best firms. Ok, so the company has enough money to pay for this award, does that mean they deserve it? Not At All…..

Don’t be fooled by credentials – marketing firms can pay to be listed in just about any publication and most of those publications offer some sort of an award category as an incentive to get people to pay for inclusion.

If you really want to know what a company is like and what they will offer to you, talk with them, talk with their clients, get references, etc. Then, find out who the team members are that will be working on your project and Google them. You will be surprised what you find out about them.

You should also make sure that their company is willing to put their techs on the phone and let you get the scoop from them – most marketing firms that aren’t as reputable as they should be will often times keep you talking with the sales rep. What you really need to know is what the process entails, what is expected of you, what is expected of the marketing firm, how they will implement suggested changes, what marketing programs they will include you in, etc. – Get The Details.

The more time you spend talking with the sales rep and the tech team, the more you will see how much they are willing to communicate. Remember, if you have a team that won’t communicate with you, the chance of your success greatly diminishes.

Bottom line, don’t settle for just any old firm simply because they have been ranked top by major online and print sources – chances are they are paid credentials.

Using a 301 Redirect will help you keep the value of the old “orphaned” pages and redirect that value to the new pages that have replaced them.  * Remember, duplicate content is a huge no-no to the search engines and will prevent your site from attaining good keyword ranking.

Depending on the server platform your website is hosted on and the programming language used to create your site, you have a lot of different options for setting up 301 redirects.

Here are the primary methods for the most common programming languages / server platforms:

.htaccess 301 Redirect
This is the most common redirect method used on Linux servers with the “mod-rewrite” module.  Simply download or create a file (using a text editor) called .htaccess.  Add the line below to the text file, save upload to the root directory of your site and you’re done.

Redirect an old page to a new page:
redirect 301 /old/old.html http://www.yourdomain.com/new.html

Redirect an old page to a new folder/category:
redirect 301 /old/old.html http://www.yourdomain.com/folder/

PHP 301 Redirect
<?
Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.new-url.com” );
?>

.NET 301 Redirect
<script runat=”server”>
private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
Response.Status = “301 Moved Permanently”;
Response.AddHeader(“Location”,”http://www.new-url.com”);
}
</script>

Ruby 301 Redirect
def old_action
headers["Status"] = “301 Moved Permanently”
redirect_to “http://www.new-url.com/”
end

Cold Fusion
<.cfheader statuscode=”301? statustext=”Moved permanently”>
<.cfheader name=”Location” value=”http://www.new-url.com”>