Question, Need a lot of feed back. Which should I use?

Okay, So I started therantandrave.net back in march and it was an all news, videos, whatever site. I worked my butt off doing seo, promotion, updating content and started making money with google within 2 months. I started getting 5000+ uniques a day. I went through some personal things and got uninterested because it wasnt something I was interested in.

So I wiped the whole site about 2 weeks ago and started from scratch. I started something that I actually liked doing and was interested in because it's the key to a good site anyways. But my hits and everything dwindled as expected to almost nothing.

Anyways, I wanted to have a big forum which I have a downloads section integrated into and it is so hard to get a forum going from scratch.

So which page should I use for my home page?

the forum www.therantandrave.net

Or this page www.therantandrave.net/wp/

 

you were not getting 5000 uniques a day. if you did, you would have more than 9 forum members in 2 weeks.

 

Maybe the WP one should be your home page.

 

Listen, don't tell me what I was getting. This was a few months ago. I quit updating the site like I stated, it sat and like I said, it was a currents news website, so people quit coming because I had no new news and content and erased all of the pages and keywords that I was ranking for, hence I am getting no traffic to those pages now because there was no new content, and now they do not exist and those keywords do not exist.

I am asking for opinion's, not for you to tell me what I was and wasn't getting in the past. My site also went down in ranking to 5mill over the past couple of months also. A site doesn't stay in a good ranking when it's left to rot. And it doesn't keep getting it's hits when new content isn't being added especially when my site was based on current news,and also the whole site was erased.

And I stated I started working on the site and forums almost 2 weeks ago,
EDITS: hits doesn't mean people are going to register on your site.

EDIT:ALSO: Another edit, if you would of looked at my alexa ranking, look at all the keywords i ranked for, and look at the 60% drop in traffic in a couple month range.

Please get your facts before you try to bash someone and make them look bad.
Think before you make an accusation next time dude.

And I actually wrote an article way back then and posted it on here about how I was doing my SEO and my techniques to achieving those kind of hits so fast, I even got 16000 unique hits in one day, which was the day it all started.

Anyways, I am thinking about keeping the front page/blog since it is really hard to get a forum to get off of it's feet. I just got the site and forum and everything done, up and indexed a couple days ago.

I could direct posts to the forum also which could help.

 

Dude, your site never cracked 100K on alexa, it's not possible that you were getting 5000 unique visitors a day.

 

I find that both pages scroll for quite a distance.

 

JahRasta, I think you are jealous or just ignorant. Like I posted in the other bulletin that I posted last April that you decided to try to bash, I will post a screenshot up of all those hits I got that day.

Just for you.

 

I suggest keep promoting your website on the places where you get interested visitors for your forum..

 

Yeah for sure.



And JahRastah, you are ignorant, I don't care that you made a digg refferring to my article as the stupidest article ever with 1 digg...-_- which was probably your own. I ignore you on the other article and you come over here. Either you are jealous or you are mad that I gave you a negative rep point, or both?

Let's act our age now.




Anyways, new layout for the home page that i just got done with tonight. Let me know what you all think

 

I'm not sure how anyone can state with such certainty what happened to a site that no longer exists. If it's gone, how does one know how many hits it ever received (other than the owner looking at his stats).

The current front page looks ok to me, but I'm not the one to ask about design.
What I did see was, not a single h1 on your page. On an SEO site.

Since it's your main, front page, your logo/name-of-site would likely be the h1, while inner pages would use the h1 for naming your sub-pages (forum, about, etc). But not having one at all is like writing a college paper and not giving it a title : )

And that would look bad to anyone looking at your code to see if you really knew what you were talking about re SEO (not that an h1 is going to make or break any page, but everyone knows there should be one). Possibly wordpress is to blame for this but you should be able to fix it.

You likely will need a pile of good articles before there's anything to jump start a forum. People start off in forums talking about the articles, until there's enough of a community to kinda move itself along.

 

Yeah, I am working hard to write articles but it takes time. I just got that new layout up about 2 hours ago and have been working on it since. h1's are good yes but I am still doing a lot of work heh, custom coding the php files and such and messing with the template and the style css file. Messing with colors and such.
I was using a diff layout when I began this post but I am never satisfied with anything I do. We are our own worst critics I guess. But thank you. If you happen to check out the downloads section you might like what is in there.


But, I have actually heard h2 tag gives more weight than the h1 tag, what are your thoughts on this?
I still feel that it all comes down to prominence though meaning whichever tag that has the target keyword comes first in your codes is more accessible to the spiders.

 

You're missing the point of the <h?> tags. They mean something. And no, an h2 would not have more weight than an h1, unless you've written the page incorrectly and for some reason have multiple h1's and just one h2, and in the wrong order.

H1 means "main header", what most of us consider the title of that page (separate from the <title> tag, but that should reflect both the page name AND the site name... and because of how small browser tabs are, I put the page name first, then the site name:
Get A Quote - SuperInsurance.com)

h2 is by its very nature a sub header. It belongs under the topic of the page (expressed in the h1), but it takes a slightly more specific take on that title, and everyone who follows the h2 is in that same amount of specificity.

Because a page's topic could have multiple sub-topics, you may have multiple h2's. If you have like 10 of them you're probably doing something wrong.

I've seen some rare cases where it strangely made sense to have more than one h1 per page, and the usual solution for that ends up being a splash page, which are a waste of electrons. An example might be a company made up of two quite different sections: commercial and individual/private. Most people would say, go find a way to have a main page anyway with one h1 (the comapny, what it does/is about) and use h2's for the two chunks, commercial and individual. But whatever, these are rules of thumb.

And the googles, they do follow these rules of thumb. Since h1 means title of the page, that's how google would try to interpret that. Multiple h1's, or the lack of an h1, makes it harder for search bots to do that (so they just deal with it and possibly they even make random decisions... we don't know).

Re keywords: if you've written a page or an article and the keyword or topic doesn't appear right away, you must be doing something wrong. How can you write a college paper about dogs without having the word Dog in at least the main title (h1) or the main sub titles (h2's, h3's)? Meaning, keywords should come naturally.

You are always writing for human beings first, and robots second (or third, whatever). Robots do not buy things, they do not join forums, they do not keep sites alive. They only make roadsigns for humans. Writing for a human always comes first, always. If how you are writing something does not follow the generally accepted flow of a newspaper article or college paper, or sounds "wrong" or awkward when you read it in a relaxed manner, you're doing it wrong. The only place you should be writing a list of keywords is on a pad of paper next to you, to remind you of the flow of your article (like an outline you did back in school).

And a header generally naturally has keywords, without you needing to think or worry about them. : )

 

That makes a lot of sense -_-

Now I can argue that topic =D Thanks for the info though.

 

Excellent info there, Stomme poes, and very well written. Makes a lot of sense too.

 

What caused the sudden jump in visitors on 7th of APR?

 

A certain topic ended up being the top ranked for it's keyword in the search on a topic I did on a show that was having it's season finally. It was top ranked in Google and Msn. My site was a media and news site so I was always posting about anything from politics to entertainment. If you read an old article I wrote, I explain my method how I was using Google trends and beating most to the punch on a lot of topics. It is on my website if you want to see the article.

 

I personally do not like the fusion64 forum style(never have never will) but that's just me, the WP looks good and some interesteing reads aswell.

 

Quite right. I guess theres a question because usually you wouldn't just kill a site with 5000 per day. Why? let it stagnate maybe then develop the other site and make it live on the domain when its ready.


Thats alot of work to just throw in the garbage.

 

I dunno if I'm missing something here but both options seem to be the same or very little differences. I like the concept though good job!