I have a forum that is a couple of weeks old with several regular posters. My main domain mysite.com redirects to mysite.com/forum and the first result that shows in google is mysite.com/forum. Infact, the domain mysite.com doesnt even show in google, only mysite.com/forum. My problem is that im about to hire someone to do some SEO work for my site, but im not sure if i should tell them to make links to mysite.com or mysite.com/forum. I want to actually have all links to mysite.com , but im worried I will waste my money on this SEO job because google seems to only list mysite.com/forum and not mysite.com, even though it redirects to the same place. What should I do? thanks
Why not experiment and try a little of both, wait and see what happens, and then place a larger order based on your analytics? Also, if I were you, I'd be more concerned about getting traffic than whether the traffic was coming to a specific subpage of my site or not. Getting traffic to your site at all is a challenge; if you're actually having some fortune with the /forum subpage, I think you should see if you can build on that success.
Just be patience, SEO does take times. You got to keep track of the SEO work you do, like backlink records, etc. Planning ahead is important for SEO, you don't want to miss anything. Clean up the mess.
You could "split-test" Well you are trying to get traffic to the /forum right. Then do SEO for that. You don't want to waste that much time with redirecting and SEO for the redirect page. Just SEO for the exact /forum page.
If your forum is only 2 weeks old you need to build it up a bit before SEO will even do it any good. People looking for a forum off a search engine want to see a forum already thriving and busy. If you already have that, kudos to you and the SEO part will come easily, as a forum that viral will generate its own links from its enthusiastic members.
Yeah, you said you had some loyal posters. You need consistent traffic and posts/threads for a good forum. Find ways to SEO and bring traffic. The more targeted traffic the more you chances of them converting to members and signing up.
i think you should focus more on your home page. people who visit your site would first like to assure themselves with information about you, your company, products, etc. you can place a link to your forum on the home page to direct interested visitors to the forum
it doesnt matter. Since you re-direct mysite.com to mysite.com/forum, its the same site. So search engines will know that links to mysite.com and mysite.com/forum are the same. The only time it would make a change is if you killed the redirect, the links to mysite.com will be linked to mysite.com and links to mysite.com/forum will be linked to mysite.com/forum. Make sense?