Any ideas on how to SEO my new site?

Please take a look at http://gcsl.org.uk

I'm completely stuck for ideas on how to promote this site - mainly because I can't think of what search arguments potential viewers are likely to use to look for it ! (It's a local community forum web site, dealing with issues of neighbourhood renewal in St.Leonards-on-Sea)

The few search arguments I can think of just don't show the site at all. In my web stats, I have zero entries in my keyword/keyphrases search list.

Another problem with the site, is that most of the content is dynamically produced from Cute News. While this is good for letting the Forum committee members update the site, I presume it's useless for getting their posts scanned/crawled by Google etc? (Google is visiting the site!)

Any suggestions anyone?

Many thanks

 

I know that you will of thought of this but use

St.Leonards-on-Sea

but change your title to this also

and put it into your signature here or edit the post above.

Don't concern yourself that you will be upsetting local sensibilities with the title change as the first text will cover that problem.

You could also look at exchanging links with the local government sites and also with other regeneration sites

Good Luck

 

According to google only the first page is in the index. Not sure how long this has been up, so this might simply be because of a lack of time. You need to get some links into your site to encourage the spider to do its job. It might be a good idea to have a manual 'recent posts' section together with links to the pages, you can hard code these.

Personally I would say you are on a hiding to nothing trying to get this optimised for the search engines. If you want to optimise it, then I would ignore all the additions, and set up a page for each area that you are targetting. Write up a piece about that area, and add links to your forum etc from there.

Invision is spiderable, so once you get some posts on there you will get pages listed (provided you have spiderable links to the forum.

I persoanlly would market this offline with press releases to local newspapers, community magazines, church mags etc and posters for libraries shops and other places of public gathering. This should generate word of mouth in the communities, and slowly but surely increase your readership. I would set up a newsletter (if you have not already done so), and encourage readers to forward it on. this in turn will bring in new subscribers.

 

Question: How did you deterimine that only the first

The site was first searched by Google on 8th May. My stats now show for the Google bot:
Hits : 4+1
Bandwidth: 32.66 KB
Last visit : 13 May 2004 - 19:09

Quite what "4+1" means, instead of just "5", I don't know. Can someone tell me here? (Awstats help doesn't explain this)

Thanks - didn't realise Invision was spiderable. I can help by linking posts I put there back to the pages in the main site.

Indeed. We have a newspaper, brochures and pocket diaries. All now have the web site mentioned in them.

Thanks for your views.

 

I can't change the term "Central St Leonards" as that is specific. But I'll try using "St.Leonards-on-Sea" wherever "St Leonards" is used (without "Central") and as a prefix to the title.

ie <title>St.Leonards-on-Sea : Gensing and Central St Leonards Community Forum</title>

Linking from other local sites is the next part of the "master plan".

Thanks

 

Actually AWStats does explain it, at least mine does ... check directly below the chart that shows the Robots/Spiders visitors, it says "Numbers after + are successful hits on "robots.txt" files."

Meaning how many times the Robot/Spider saw your robots.txt file. This is a good thing.

I was confused the first time as well, but then I realized it later and felt silly for not seeing it earlier.

 

Thats a good compromise

The others have covered the rest pretty well - so good luck

 

It might also be wise to move the 'minutes' to a seperate section, so that the home page can be better controlled with valuable content and links placed there. At present your page rank becomes divided between all those minute links giving each sub page a little less weighting.
Using keywords in your links would also prove useful.