Where should I invest my time to make my website successful?

I want to eventually have a successful website, and I only have a limited amount of time per day. What should I be doing during that time to maximize the effect? Building links? Posting on forum/submitting to social bookmarking? What method of promotion has the maximum effect in terms of SEO/visibility?

 

Well what's the niche of your website? If it's an established area, like dating, you'll have to work harder to promote it. If there are too few competitors and little awareness, you'll have to work that much harder to attract visitors. It all depends on the theme of the site.

So what's the site about?

 

You could try setting a pattern. For example, each day set a goal of 5 posts on digital point (site in signature), submit to 20 directories, and maybe write an article every 2 or 3 days, it depends on your situation, and how much time you have.

 

The site is about philosophy, and hence I'm pursuing the keyword 'philosophy forums', which is pretty competitive (although it can be done, I think...)

 

If I have articles, where should I submit them?

 

You can submit them to

www.isnare.com
www.ezinearticles.com
www.articledashboard.com
www.articletrader.com

to name a few. there are hundreds more but these are the most popular ones IMO.

 

The biggest problem I see with your site is in the domain name. The only thing that separates your site from one of your competitors is that the word forum is not plural. The problem I see in this is that a lot of potential repeat visitors may be going straight to your competitor because they don't include the "s".

What do you think?

 

Yeah, I know, ugh. I have been bothered by that as well the entire time. Plus, I don't really have any thing to offer that my competitors can't. I own the domain PhilosophyGuild.org, maybe I should use that instead? It's tough, because my main keyword is philosophy forums, and it really helps if that keyword is in the title of the website. /cry, help on this matter greatly appreciated.

 

Let me give you a stupid tip
Some spell "forums" as "fora"
Stupid but less competitive

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fora

 

Honestly, I think you would be better off going with a keyword that's not in the url instead. Having a keyword in the URL is great but you can definetly rank high even if you don't.

How about making a subdomain on the PhiliosophyGuild.org site that points to a forum. So it will look like this:

http://forums.philosophyguild.org

 

If that's the case then maybe buying that domain and redirecting it to the main site may work. I mispell Google all the time (with one less/more "o") when I type like crazy and it automatically redirects me.

 

That's right, and fora isn't even a "typo". Some Irish guy has told me it's the correct form, anyways just so u know

 

I'd stick with the keyword domain.

IMO one of the biggest forms of traffic a forum can have is the search engines. Therefore, you should be focusing more on that then the branding. Now how can you go about marketing the blog other than search engines? Maybe you could start a blog and establish yourself as a major player in the field. If people think you know what your talking about they will migrate over to the forum.

My 2 cents. Let us know how it goes!

 

That's an excellent idea; though I'm concerned, doesn't google penalize for redicrecting domains/duplicate content type things?

Would it work if I had everything hosted on http://philosophy-fourms.com, but put in my header the URL as philosophyguild.org so people would use that?

Or should I move everything to forum.philosophyguild.org?

 

You would put a simple snippet of code into your .htaccess file that will redirect all visitors and search engines to the new location of the forum (forum.philisophyguild.org). The change takes a few weeks but it will be well worth it in the long run.

 

I agree with Rzvagelsky, a subdomain is the best bet in this case.

Check out http://www.javascriptkit.com/howto/htaccess7.shtml for more information on how to do a redirect.

 

Wait, sorry I'm a nub, how do I edit the .htaccess?

Can't I just edit the index.html of philosophy-forums.com so that it redirects to forum.philosophyguild.org?

Edit: nevermind, read the above post.

 

but then would philosophyguild.org redirect to forum.philosophyguild.org?

 

EDIT. Not unless you want it to. If all you want to use that domain for is a forum...then you might as well redirect to philisophyguild.org

 

From that the answer to your question should be pretty straight forward, spend time ON YOUR SITE, don't promote it before you actually have something worth promoting, there's no point in gettings visitors if you can't convert them to active members.

Take a good look at your site and then think about how you could make it better than your competitors, if you don't get something they don't then I honestly don't see why people would want to be at your newly created site instead of the old established sites with lots of content and activity.