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SEO tips/startup advice for a complete noob please

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Drahnier

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2012
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my site is a forum, we have good content and a loyal userbase, however what we are lacking is new members, I'm worried if left for too long without new members apart from those who are gathered via word of mouth the place might start to Stagnate, now I do have a few Marketing ideas I'm looking into, but the fact of the matter is I will need to do some SEO at some point, how can I do this? what are the costs? what things should I look for when others offer this service? are there free ways to do SEO?
pretty much anything on the topic would be appreciated :), don't assume much Background knowledge on my part.

if you can offer SEO please send me a PM rather then posting such in this thread
 
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XML Sitemap
Robots.txt
Webmaster tools submission (sitemap.xml)
Better title than EquestriaForever
Build Backlinks (do some keyword research)
 
To get members in a forum, you must choose a niche , like WJ is a webmaster forum.
If you try to build a normal everything in it Forum, there are less chances of it succeeding .
search and target specific keywords.
like if you have an automative forum, target for some specific company of cars (Ferrari ?),
or if its adult forum, target some related keyword.
Build your website and backlinks around that keyword.

You should do-
social sharing
backlink building
on page SEO
 
I've been working through those, anything good for Vbulletin specifically?
is vBSEO that good? does it justify any extra server resource costs
 
vBSEO will unfortunately do little to improve your ranking in the SERP's.

One way you can build links is to find blog articles related to your forum's niche; you can then email the owner of that blog and ask for a link to your website from within that article.

Find as many articles as possible and email the owner of the blog with something like:

Hey owner of X.com,

I recently read this brilliant article on your website: [link to article here]

I run a forum where users can discuss this subject. We're a small community but we're growing slowly. Would you be willing to link to my website from that article? That would be great.

Kind regards,
Your Name
Click to expand...
Most will simply ignore you, a few will however help you out and give you a high quality backlink.

Send 10-20 emails like that a day making sure to target only high quality blogs.
 
Forum are delicate.

I believe you have made the proper analysis though. Stagnation is a high risk.

Now, you need to know that content is king in SEO and a forum in a snowball which means you need to have enough snow at the beginning to make it rowl and grow.

What i recommand to my SEO customers is to fake a bit the beginning. Create profiles which you boost up their authority in the database, and you make them post quality, unique and targetted content.

If you can have a killer freebie that only registrated people can get, it is great !

If you can have several killer freebies that different level of members can get even better ! On the top of your fake posts.

For instance, i joined this forum to post a service thread, (i know it is frownd upon to reveal that, but nothing to hide here) i need to have some posts to get it done. Well, as the community is well targetted to my interests, well i'm doing my best to post quality content.

I'm not looking for shortcuts, so i'm helping the best i can and that would add some great (**hopefully**) content in the eyes of google, which 10 others user may find in google in looking for SEO advice and here is a part of a snowball !

Finally, i could even love this community and keep helping after i got my goal. That is the process you need to understand, i wish you the best of luck to implement this and i hope you'll make it !
 
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