How Can I Optimize My SEO & Get Members To Be Active

[dccfoux]

Ok I think I am just disorganized but here is my situation:
I have tried to make an active forum before with no luck AT ALL(50 members after a few MONTHS) but I decided screw it, I know alot more now so I am going to try again. So I opened the site, and started advertising: paying for traffic, paying for 20 signups, running seo tools like crazy, using backlink sites like crazy. So now it has 89 members after 3 days averaging 1000 views a day, with an OK amount of posts, but only 10 people have ever made a post besides admins, and most of the people are leaving right as the enter the site, and if they signup, they signup and leave most of the time. How:

-Can I rank it higher
-Get the members to be more active
-Check my google ranking
-Change the description in search engines for my website

 

[dccfoux]

anyone?

 

[Anonymous~]

Tips how to get more members : advertise your forum here

 

[DarkMeta]

just put some valuable content on you'r forum and advertise to other related forums...

 

[dccfoux]

any seo tips?
Its not so much about getting members, but active members.

 

[BigMarcusStud]

Hire someone on oDesk to be active members. You can pay by post. Have them start threads and reply to them.

 

[jascoken]

Its not so much about getting members, but active members.

And therein lies the crux!

Any membership site takes a CRAP-LOAD of work. It won't self-sustain until you hit a critical mass of members and chatter, and people only really join and become active when others are active. Catch 22!

You either need deep-pockets to do major promotion and get to that point through sheer volume, or you need to work long and hard at providing a LOT of value and kicking off some really good discussions.

Good forums take a LONG time to mature.

 

[brainstorm1]

Typically getting active members is an issue of "converting". In this case you need to convert traffic into people who want to take part in discussions. Your forum might need some non-SEO work in that case.

However, as far as SEO is concerned you may not be targeting the right keywords. A drastic example would be if you have a music site and you rank for "buy chocolate". Even though the difference is not that great, you still need to make sure you are ranking for the right type of keywords.

 

[idealu]

Why would they stay active if there's no good information on that forum ?

Promote your forum by posting usefull and niche related posts and then you will see how your will get new active members.

 

[pietpatat]

First of all, stop paying for "20 signups". I'm just guessing but most likely these signups come from GPT sites and the people only sign up because they get rewarded for signing up and will never visit your forum again. Money spend on that is wasted.

Here a "trick" that works on me to get me signed up on a forum; sometimes when I visit a seo forum there is a special board like premium guides or downloads where you actually have to sign up the view the threads. I useally do this because I like to see whats inside. BHW uses the same thing; you can view most boards here, but if you want to see the real good stuff like the member downloads you will have to sign up. Implement this on your forum and you will see more people signing up for sure.

For the rest just place some threads on the board to get people start talking like; Introduce yourself. What do you think about this..? What do you think is the best...? I'm looking for a mod on this forum.. etc

Also depending on the niche your in and what kind of people do you target ( I wouldn't use this if you are targetting adults, but if you target kids this works really well ) you have a couple of forum modifications where people get points for posting / starting a topic etc. They can spend these points in the store to get their username in a different color or have a special icon next to their or some bs. I think they can also spend the coins in an arcade or someshit. I don't know the name for this mod but if you are targetting kids you should look it up since it works really well to get them to post more.

Besides that just use seo get your site ranked for your keywords, but I guess your already doing that. The great thing about doing seo for forum is that you can easily go for long tail keywords. Let say your forum is about diablo 3 and a long tail keyword people search for is: "How to get passed the big boss on lvl 4 in diablo" or someshit. Just create a thread: How to get passed the big boss on lvl 4, put some decent info there and blast that thread with some seo tools.

 

[Jackson Soo]

I've co-owned a couple of forums and I can tell you that the most important thing to focus on would be adding good and useful content on a regular basis.

For smaller forums, it's hard for members to be active when the admins / staff / owners are not. Don't expect them to start conversations among themselves. When we were starting out we wrote a ton of articles and facilitated discussions for a good couple of months before we started seeing some 'active' members. Check out TopAdmin.net - it's a pretty good site for budding forum owners.

Best,
Jackson