GUIDE: The main rules to increase your traffic

by **Shadow** August 25th 2009, 3:14 pm

Make sure you have already read the tutorail "How to improve your SEO" before reading the following one. Here's the 7 best ways to increase your forum traffic:

1. Search engines

GUIDE: The main rules to increase your traffic Seo-fo10

If you want to rank your forum on search engines, you have to follow some important rules. First of all, register your forum on the main search engines : Google, Yahoo!, Bing…

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Add your forum on Google and Bing webmaster tools. Thus, you will be able to check your forum evolution, submit a sitemap in order to help search engines to visit your forum and verify indexing of your pages.

Insert within your forum title and description keywords related to your forum content (for example if your forum is about soccer, you should add "soccer forum" into the title and description). Your forum title should be between 50 and 70 words (including spaces) and the description between 100 and 160 characters (including spaces).
Don't forget to complete keywords of your forum and variants (ex. For a forum about soccer you can also add some keywords like soccer, football cup, soccer team..). For more information you can read the following tutorial "How to add relevant keywords"

Let search engines access to your forum contents!

Indeed, search engines react like visitors. If your visitors cannot access your forum content, search engines can't either! It is very bad for your SEO, you will lose a large number of traffic. We highly recommend to let your forum content be visible to visitors.

The content of your forum (messages, articles...) is very important for your SEO. Indeed, search engines regularly come to read your contents. This action (robot or crawler), allow them to define the subject of your forum and to make some statistics.

To make your forum visible with your main keywords, we recommend you to inject those keywords into your subject titles or categories. Moreover, your visitors will understand easily your forum content.
So that your forum is considered as relevant, you must create as much content as you can, related to your forum subject. Create some articles, tutorials, tips, news, topics...
Avoid / Prevent special characters (eg \ ==> V01TuR3 <==/), SMS language and spelling. These are obstacles to expanding your forum both for visitors who are annoyed by the errors and other languages SMS or Search engines that cannot index many pages on your forum because of special characters etc..

2. Banners and links exchanges

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Links exchanges: Traffic coming from websites with which you exchange link (your forum url). Thus, you can make some partnership to exchange your forum with another website. Publishing your forum link to another website (with the same thematic) can: interest users that will visit the website and we increase your traffic.

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Banners exchanges: Traffic coming from websites with which you exchange banner.

Make your forum known with similar topics or users. The more you share and communicate, the more search engines will rank your forum on top pages.

The most important when doing a link exchange is the link text. It is imperative to place a keyword from your forum. If your forum talks about Ferrari cars, you will have to choose a keyword such as "Ferrari cars". The more links you make that are relevant and consistent with the main subject of your forum, the more search engines will think your forum is also relevant and will place it in top positions in search results. Do not hesitate to place links to larger sites speaking of the subject of your forum (eg a link to the official FIFA forum for football), search engines like this kind of action. Be careful not to exaggerate, if your forum is dedicated to the exchange of link and has virtually no content, it is likely that you get the opposite of what you are looking for.

The exchange of banners are much less interesting than link exchanges. Indeed, the banner exchange does not affect the referencing in the search engines. The only advantage is that you stand out a link and drain more easily the audience from the partner site to your forum.

3- Gather your friends, family and colleagues thanks to social networks

GUIDE: The main rules to increase your traffic Social11

Do not hesitate your use of Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or Scoop.it. Social networks have their own search engine, so it is good to not only depend on Google.
Use our internal tools to send to all your Facebook, MSN, Gmail,... contacts an invitation to register or visit your forum.
You can also manually send various emails to our friends.

4- Choose the category in our directory close to your forum contents

GUIDE: The main rules to increase your traffic Forum-10

Founders can find this step on this administrative panel. It helps your forum to have a better Google rank. Indeed, Forumotion board directory has two advantages:
only best active forums are displayed and thousands of users browse it daily.

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Once this step is over, you have to register to the top 10 web directory. First, you can select generalist directories then specialized directories. You will generate more traffic on your website by selecting a specialized directory, on which users are looking for the same content than your forum.

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Avoid choosing a directory that requires banner or link of your forum in return. That is obsolete, technics and Google will penalize your forum for that.

5- Last advices to avoid classic errors

Prefer contents visible to visitors so that search engines access your forum. Those contents will also be visible on search engines results.
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Avoid automatic referencers, by placing their link or banner on your forum you promote their websites and not yours.
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Avoid SEO base on the acquisition of optimized links. Your forum risks to be penalized and you will lose more traffic. It is better to get natural links thanks to a relevant and targeted content.
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Avoid all directories that require a banner or link in exchange. You will promote their brand but you won't get back any benefit.
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Avoid to add music or graphical effects on your forum. That strongly degrades your site, and leads visitors to desert it! If they want to listen to music you can do it via their computer. Graphical effects won't impresses no one and will distinguish the lettering!
Avoid duplicate contents already available on the net. Search engines tackle duplicate topic and it is against copyright law. Your topic can be deleted and your forum penalized!
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Never use providers of free domain name like ".tk, .sc.cz, .tart ". Search engines penalize a lot those kinds of domain name and you won't appear on search.
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Add keywords on your content (title, messages, subject...). But don't exaggerate, otherwise you can have the opposite effect!

6- To extend and deepen knowledge of SEO

How to add keywords on your forum?
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Analyze your forum traffic with Google Analytics
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Improve your SEO
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Google guidelines

7- Last Forumotion advice

Ask your moderators and members to promote your forum.
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If you use social networks, don't hesitate to share your forum, create a group or create a Facebook page. That will generate a lot of traffic on your forum!