hey! i've got a problem, I orderd a SEO to seo my forum, done first month got some good rankings.. but still not ranking top for the keyword WE want! the people we're trying to dethrown have 34,000 links. with 9 years of age! will this effect our word?
I would say that you have your work cut out for you. Owner of that website looks as though is associated with the local council. (some very tasty natural backlinks)
Trying to outranked sites with strong SERP ranking is not done in a day or two. You need to continue promoting and building links of your site. More focus on the keyword that you want to target.
Do you really want to beat your competition? Do what they are doing, but learn to do it better. Of course, if they are doing things that they shouldn't be doing then don't follow in their steps. It is better to settle for second best and do things right, than to follow the lead of corruption and be led down a path of regret!
If your rival is this other milton keynes forum www.mkweb.co.uk/forum/ then it's an official Council forum, and therefore has the weight of getting backlinks from the Council website
use some easy keyword first and change to competitive one when you have enough backlink. for example you can target mk web , mk center or mk online. do some research on that mk phrases. that phrase you should use as your title tag.
Start a blog and promote the forum in the blog. Burn the blog feed. Make top level categories in the forum.
It will just take a lot of time. The best way, imo, is to have a website too with lots of information about the city such as best places to go and see and buy things. Then you'll get traffic from that from locals/tourists and can transfer that to the forum. Otherwise, as it is as just a forum, it's pretty saturated market potentially and so will take a lot of time.
It is pretty difficult if you want to do it in short term.. my advice is to utilize Social marketing as well to boost up the awareness of your site.
yeah i know, we're just getting 5 random users everyday to post about 10 5 threads and 5 posts google should notice us more shouldn't they?
i suggest you to focus on the alternative keywords. 34k backlinks is a bit difficult to reach in a short period
It's going to take time and money. Create categories for the forum before you have a mess. Social marketing and the blog will go a long way. Update local events on the blog and the feed should get picked up super fast by Google. The blog should drive a lot of traffic into forum.
i understand. We are listed for words like "liam young fruad" and milton keynes forum like that, we will become first for Milton Keynes, we have built 2k links within a month I think we can have have it soon. We're not even listed in the first 200 yet i don't understand why do I need a blog? how do I do a blog?
I would use anchor text in your signature to begin with. I am in a similar position with my competition. I believe that domain age plays a big factor for google results.
It took me two years to knock out number one for a keyword I was after. Just keep at it, make your site better than theirs. Start a blog, put some videos on U tube, go and shag the guys wife Keep working on it to your number one.