I know there are a lot of EXPERTS in this forum, so I was hoping you provide recommendations on link building and site promotion. I have a month old forum site. It's a general topic site but it's local. Target audience is within the country. It still has very few posts since it's just a month old but I it is basically invisible. I have a facebook page and it is the only thing that refers traffic to my forum site. I get around 30 a day (pathetic, I know) and I keep sharing (posts) and posting on the facebook page just to get traffic. I use twitter and google plus but have no traffic coming from that route. I don't rank yet in any of my keywords, even the easy ones. I currently use socialadr for the bookmarks and just got an alert that my limit for a free account is up. I can try to post on forums but It will probably take me forever to rank if that's all I do. I am eyeing seoclerks but everyone says it's not good or low quality. I look at the established seo sites, and they are ridiculously expensive. I guess my questions is, what do I do next? Where can I afford an seo service that actually works? I can work on a budget but I am really careful because my first website was a flop and spent considerable money on it. So I am careful now, all ideas are really appreciated.
I would stay away with SEOClerks and Fiverr is you want a decent SEO service, you'll be paying for rubbish if you hire anyone from there. You won't find a "SEO service" which works, there isn't a single service you can buy which is going to improve your websites SEO, sure you can buy services which will help your website, but you need a plan behind buying these services. You mentioned you don't rank for any keywords yet, if you send me a PM with those keywords I'm happy to take a look and let you know why your website might not be ranking for them yet. I'd also stop bothering with SocialADR, automated (espically web automated) social bookmarking tools are all rubbish, believe me I've split test them, social monkee is much worse then SocialADR but your honestly wasting your time. Like you said this forum is full of experts but nobody is going to work on your website for free, especially when anyone who know what they're talking about already has their own projects to attend too.
I already visited your website and I would say that it is too general much better if you have an specific topic on your forum like SEO forum, Sports forum, or relationship forum and this is to target your audience. Regarding with the snippet of your site in the search results I would suggest to make it more appealing focus your description on providing benefits for the visitors and it should be 160-170 characters long. The title must target specific topic along with your main keyword and choose the best keyword phrase for your forum site. The forum website must optimize for the target audience to increase traffic.
if its a local site, it can be general topic. i run a city website with big forum - but everything whats going on is very local, inside the city (80%), countrywide (20%), nice big traffic. one month is nothing - now you must start interesting topics yourself but they must reflect daily happenings in that area, dont just make things up - that wont work! write with 10 usernames, ask friends to help you, you will see the change in 3-6 months. but you really must do it every day 10 topics and replies, otherwise you will fail.
If you don't want to spend money for you SEO, I will suggest you to concentration with SEO work. Like, Do some guest posting in other websites, make quality content and submit in another article directory sites. There is countless SEO work you can do for increase your website rank. If you want to save your time and spend few money for your site? I would suggest you to stay with SEOClerks website. They have some good experience worker, who can give awesome service for your website. Good luck. Regards, Mohammad Reaz
Ummm... let's see, you start a web master forum, right, to share your knowledge & ideas. But, if you don't even know how to market it, what good is your forum going to be for others? it cracks me up when newbies start a web master related web site, yet they don't know the trade themselves. No offence, but that market is saturated, look at this forum for example... it gets around 1000 visitors on it, most the time, yet, look at the number of new posts, sales, domains etc. Even with 1000's of posts & members/guests - it's still pretty dead. The majority are lurkers & are coming here to view threads from search engines. That's your answer... post some useful stuff, most of all offer something that people actually want to see & participate in.
You should be careful in choosing right SEO company and other things as well. Since marketing is always a most complex thing you should be persistent but careful. Do not buy thousand of non-relevant links, esp. from websites where you can get plenty of them for low price. No use of that. Anyway if you have an good idea you will definitely succeed, but it needs time... Wish you luck!