Need advise on SEO & forum administration

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avi

avi

Keymaster
Guys I have few questions related to SEO & site administration :

1. I run a forum, it was started in last week of march / april -2011 beginning, so it's totally four full months. Following are the stats :

Our members have made a total of 3,102 posts in 401 threads.
We currently have 341 members registered.
Click to expand...
Though no. of registered members is good, but no. of active members is poor. Just some 15 people who reply. And among 15, most of them never start a thread by themselves. Hardly one or two start. Me & my two friends, we all three start threads. I also one or two members who start threads very rarely. But i try always to start new threads & encourage others to reply. & most importantly I ask my friends to reply so that others also motivated to reply. [truth to be told, many are coming just for free books and ain't coming back later though I encourage them to post. I need to know what I am missing / where I am doing mistake]

No, I am not expecting some magical fairy to land on my forum & post threads.

here is Google Analytics report 11 / July / 2011 to 11 / Aug / 2011 :

sjheK.jpg


Now, please answer my doubts :
1. So is the traffic on my site is good ??
2. I think no. of active members is less. What do you guys say ?

Please answer my above questions honestly. I read that, a forum to become fully active would take 2-3 years, I presume it to be true. But I just wanted to know, how are the current stat is up to. I am totally ready to take -ve criticism. I don't mind at all, I want to learn from my mistakes :)

now, how shall I attract users ? Does putting ads in facebook or google helps ? FYI, my forum is related to books, novels & writing etc.

2. Does enabling guests to reply help in anyway ?

3. One of author has contacted me to put ads about his book on my forum. He is requested to put ad just below forum header [just like here]. Given above stats & all, how much I should charge him ? His ad will be for one month & will be displayed on every forum section. Though I don't intend to put ads so early, but I still like to know.

4. How exactly I make use of SEO ? I really have no idea.

the aboutus result shows that there are problems

ReadersEnclave.com - AboutUs Wiki Page

and also seoupgrader shows 57% - SEO Tool result for site readersenclave.com - SeoUpgrader

-title
-meta description
-h1 headings
-robot.txt
-site map xml etc

I really have no idea how to fix these things.

Thank you advance :D
 
Firstly why do u think people would cone to forum if they can get things/info easily without registering I'm not sure whether closed forum would be a good idea but you can put a hide link kind of tab so that the links info are visible only when I reply to thread, search engine optimisation would attract new users when they would be Googling stuff
 
Actually I thought other way around & also why would people want to join some site if they are not sure what the actual content inside is [provided my site is not famous]
 
Publish things interesting to people like polls etc and competitions attract a lot of people. A moderator post for getting 'x' no of people or something like that. try some things and monitor the stats for different single pages what are the pages getting more attention do it more often. I am not telling to spam but send the users a mail or two per month giving a brief description of what is going on in the site. Hope it helps..

Peace...
 
^thank you for replying :)

and yes, I haven't tried much with Polls, will start on them now :)
 
robot.txt is what search engine uses to scan your site Info:- The Web Robots Pages

Meta description is like the tags that we use in wordpress etc those shuold atleast be present in the index of your site so that search engines direct towards you when those terms are used in search engines .

Title is what is shown in the tab when some one opens your site it is also in the head section and there is not much you can do about it in frameworks.

H1 headings - Generally the headings are used to detect the content of the page and the heading are deteremined by the h1 type text on the page.
 
^thanks for replying :)

actually I know what actually they mean, but I don't know how to fix those errors in mybb
 
create a robots.txt and follow instructions in above link

add a meta description in the overall header with relative terms of your site

nothing much to do with title

generally the heading will be in h1 if not change the headings of post to h1
 
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I will try & report here. Thanks for replying !

actually in myBB editing headers, meta tags etc quite difficult for me [n00b here]
 
In phpbb there is a file called overall_header.html in the theme folder editing it means editing the header all over the site. I guess myBB is a ripoff of phpbb so its the same .
 
I tried to fix few things and I think it's correct now :)

Now I need suggestions on meta & keyword discriptions
 
That is the whole thing about SEO. All the advice that i can give is dont flood the meta description with keywords which are irrelevant because search engines have a treshold limit of meta keywords any page having more than that is considered as spam. So choose your words wisely.
 
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