Routing traffic to my site - how

Hi there,

Let me start by apologizing for asking what probably is a really newbie question.

Anyway, here we go:

There is this niche online forum that I have found. It's interesting and it has a loyal following. But it's crazy neglected in terms of technology, design, promotion, everything.

So, I have decided to create a better version of it. And I would like the existing users of the "old" forum to move over to my site. (No spam or naughty schemes, my site will be better in every way.)

How do I do that?

The thing is that the forum has the most clunky domain name ever, like "myrvfixersite.com" so I assume that many visitors find the forum by:

1. Googling for the name like "recreational vehicle repair forum" and then scrolling down until they find the right name, or

2. because they happen to type in a search term that returns an old forum post (more than 1M posts over the years - lots of quality content)

I guess that a conventional strategy would be to make sure that my "new" site is optimized with the same search terms at the "old" forum.

But are there other clever things I could do?

What if I register "myrvrepairsite.com" optimize keywords and then redirect it to the "new" forum site?

Are there any way of redirecting the traffic from people finding "old" forum posts with Google?

Perhaps I should add that there is little or no SEO done in my particular niche.

I'd love to hear your ideas and don't mind coughing up with a bit of $$ to get things working.


Thanks guys,

Manus Nigra

PS. Above domain name is obviously not the domain name in question.