SEO The Share an SEO Tip Thread.

[Cedric]

Got an SEO tip that’s been working wonders for your community or site? Drop it here and let’s help each other grow! Think about a keyword strategy, optimizing old threads, or a tool you love. share your advice and learn from your fellow community leaders.

A few ideas to get you started:

• What small SEO tweak made a big difference for your traffic?
• Found any cool tools or trends lately?
• How do you handle SEO for new or updated content?

 

[Al]

As an absolute SEO novice; subscribed.

 

[Bryn]

Recently, I've found this very useful, although I only made use of it yesterday and would take a wee while for guest activity to explode...

What it does it submits your forum/site to 379 search engines but overall, it actually submits it to over 200,000 websites. Although, there's an extra 79 search engines/directories to submit to manually.

 

[Cory]

I make sure to add relevant title attributes to images and sometimes links.

 

[Cpvr]

If you want to rank for short-tail keywords, I’d recommend focusing on ranking for long-tail keywords first, as they’re usually less competitive. By ranking for long-tail keywords, you can generally start ranking for short-tail keywords over time, especially if you rank well for the long-tail ones.


Long-tail keywords usually contain more than 3-4 words, whereas short-tail keywords are more popular and generic. For example, a short-tail keyword might be ‘forum,’ while a long-tail keyword could be ‘the best admin forum.’

Additionally, building backlinks using a mixture of both long-tail keyword phrases and short-tail keywords is something I’d recommend.

Be sure to build links to other pages besides your forum’s homepage as well, especially if you want those pages to rank higher too.

 

[frm]

Not SEO, per se, but buy expiring keyword domains in your niche as they likely have traffic.

At one time, I had over 100 domains forwarding into 1. With an average of 8.5 type-ins per domain per month at a cost of $9/yr ($900 for the portfolio), I was essentially paying 8.8 cents CPC on the exact match keyword domain with low to medium competition with bids of $0.25-1.75, saving a ton of money from traditional advertising.

The plus side is when I was done with that niche, people wanted to develop their businesses on those domains. Out of that portfolio, I got a maximum of $2000 for one of then (others I've sold for a few hundred here and a few hundred there, keeping what I felt as the best 20 or so that I won't let go for less than $7500 each).

You can also do this for dead forums that have links — just redirect to yours and hope $9 can buy you a member per year at the least.

 

[ken_gitahi]

People sleep on image SEO. File names and alt attributes can make a significant different if you think about them from an SEO and not purely organizational standpoint. They also help make your site more accessible, and Google at one time said accessibility is important for ranking. I am not sure if they still take accessibility as a ranking factor, but these optimizations do not hurt and cost nothing to implement, so why not implement them?

 

[Cedric]

Not SEO, per se, but buy expiring keyword domains in your niche as they likely have traffic.

At one time, I had over 100 domains forwarding into 1. With an average of 8.5 type-ins per domain per month at a cost of $9/yr ($900 for the portfolio), I was essentially paying 8.8 cents CPC on the exact match keyword domain with low to medium competition with bids of $0.25-1.75, saving a ton of money from traditional advertising.

The plus side is when I was done with that niche, people wanted to develop their businesses on those domains. Out of that portfolio, I got a maximum of $2000 for one of then (others I've sold for a few hundred here and a few hundred there, keeping what I felt as the best 20 or so that I won't let go for less than $7500 each).

You can also do this for dead forums that have links — just redirect to yours and hope $9 can buy you a member per year at the least.

This is an underrated method, but very much effective.

I bought adminforums.org a while ago. At first nothing special. But this domain was first registered in 2010. There was a big admin forum during that time. Since I have redirected it to Administrata, it has proven some solid results. Average 7k views a day. Also, my 404 page is being hit several times a day:
View attachment 121

View attachment 117
View attachment 119
View attachment 120
View attachment 118

So that tells me, there's been approximately 4k hits from old adminforums.org content that redirects to here. There isn't much conversion rate yet, but still this is pretty amazing traffic considering Administrata is only a few weeks old.

To put that in perspective: the red box is when the domain was not redirected yet:

View attachment 122

 

[frm]

This is an underrated method, but very much effective.

I bought adminforums.org a while ago. At first nothing special. But this domain was first registered in 2010. There was a big admin forum during that time. Since I have redirected it to Administrata, it has proven some solid results. Average 7k views a day. Also, my 404 page is being hit several times a day:
View attachment 121

View attachment 117
View attachment 119
View attachment 120
View attachment 118

So that tells me, there's been approximately 4k hits from old adminforums.org content that redirects to here. There isn't much conversion rate yet, but still this is pretty amazing traffic considering Administrata is only a few weeks old.

To put that in perspective: the red box is when the domain was not redirected yet:

View attachment 122

All it takes is one good domain like that too.

 

[Bryn]

Since I have redirected it to Administrata, it has proven some solid results.

You sly old devil you...