Simple Machines Community Forum

Customizing SMF => Building Your Community and other Forum Advice => Topic started by: chaos40 on June 03, 2019, 10:39:25 AM

Title: advice on advertising my forum
Post by: chaos40 on June 03, 2019, 10:39:25 AM
Hello all,

Looking for some general advice on how to get my google rankings up and advertise my forum.

We're a general purpose forum with lots of political discussion, trolling & flaming.

Thanks
Title: Re: advice on advertising my forum
Post by: Looking on June 03, 2019, 10:42:01 AM
Trolling and flaming?
Title: Re: advice on advertising my forum
Post by: vbgamer45 on June 03, 2019, 10:42:38 AM
Have good content, interesting posts focus on that.
Then tell friends, family, if you have budget you can advertise on facebook/google.
Title: Re: advice on advertising my forum
Post by: chaos40 on June 03, 2019, 10:45:15 AM
Quote from: Looking on June 03, 2019, 10:42:01 AM
Trolling and flaming?

YEah, we kinda troll and flame each other. Real childish stuff. But it's all just for laughs.  ;D

most of the time anyways
Title: Re: advice on advertising my forum
Post by: miyaka_0421 on July 10, 2019, 02:16:55 AM
focus on optimizing your website both on-page and off-page...submit your website link into a different free link building sites, use your top keywords as much as possible from title to its content. use tags or hashtags...these are some tips that will definitely help you or you may consider hiring an SEO (Search Engine Optimization), a virtual assistant that could help you get higher ranks on any search engines.
Title: Re: advice on advertising my forum
Post by: Kindred on July 10, 2019, 09:11:37 AM
SEO like that is basically useless on a forum
Title: Re: advice on advertising my forum
Post by: drewactual on July 10, 2019, 08:35:52 PM
Quote from: Kindred on July 10, 2019, 09:11:37 AM
SEO like that is basically useless on a forum

i like kindred about as much as kindred likes me- but notions of emotions aside, kindred is right about this. kindred, when bereft of emotion, is usually right.

I used to think the search engines, especially google, played some sort of rigged game with those trying to get themselves noticed, but that was and is hogwash.  what they ARE trying to do, by my reckoning based on observation over the years, is create a 'standard'.  pretty simple, actually.

what, in my humble opinion, it takes are these measures:
1- clean and operational site- meaning free of malware of any kind and any kind of affiliation (link share) with sites that practice that crap.  A site that functions with few 4xx or 5xx results on crawls. 

2- time, and time while clearly identifying target market.  time includes actively changing and increasing content related to target market.

3- properly formed explanations which doesn't have as much to do with the search engine but how a potential user sees the webpage on search results- and where YOU can make it right.. h1's, h2's, h3's, and even h4's are important in this realm... it used to be solely to format your page with proper headings and so you can reuse the format over and over with simplicity- and it's still important for that... but it seems the engines have moved away from meta descriptions and keywords and parse content with as much or more weight, now.  so... your index may bring traffic, but your THREADS are what has potential to get you noticed. 

Quotearranging your display.template to have the main site name as an h1, the thread title as an h2, and the content as h3's will serve you well.  in this manner, the search engine can see the importance of the CONTENT and that is what draws folks.  a result on the engine will be, for instance, (h1)YOUR PAGE TITLE and right below it (h2) The Thread Title and trailing off the result the (h3)blahblahblah this is a blurb of what is the content of the post...

traffic on a niche (small and clearly defined) can get you noticed quickly, but that has to be expounded upon, and leveraged for momentum- SO LONG AS YOU AREN'T GUILTY OF BAD PRACTICES such as 'link sharing' through sites that run the usual nefarious BS along with their 'links for sale'.   that's a good way to get google ignoring you.

i aim to help, that is all... the above represents my own experiences.