Hello, Me and my wife just recently set up a new site dedicated to the Apple platform. www.appleusers.net i am new to all this talk about backlinks,seo,meta, and these 1,000 different terms I have read on this site. So far it is very confusing. I have used a few of the guys services for unique visitors and things of that nature, but doesn't seem to be working becuase I want people to stay and help grow the community, not to see it than leave. i would like to know am I going at this wrong? I really am not doing this forum strictly for some extra cash, I am doing it for the community part of it. my wife works for Microsoft, but we both love apple. So I am basicly looking for a way to get more genuine traffic to the site that wants to stay and help it grow. Any suggestions would be great, and advice.
I'd say it looks like you're getting some pretty decent traffic especially for being a newbie. Here are some basics from your the terms you mentioned: Backlinks - links to your site from other websites. The search engines really love this. If you want your site to rank for "apple user forum" then make the anchor text for you link say "apple user forum" SEO - Search engine optimization. Exactly what it says; optimizing your site so the search engines like it and rank it well. Meta Tags - don't worry about them. The search engines really don't care any more about them. You said you would like to know what you are doing wrong. Well what are you doing so far to get traffic to your site? Here are a few great ways to get traffic: 1) Get backlinks from article directories like ezinearticles.com. You will need to setup a free account with them. Then submit some articles that are related to the apple computer niche. Give good information but don't try to sell people on your forum. At the end of the article in the author bio box is where you want to talk about your forum. Put a link to your forum using the anchor text for whatever keyword you want your forum to rank well for in the search engines. Some other good article directories are goarticles.com and ideamarketers.com 2) Setup a myspace account and join a community that is related to apple computers. Stay active at myspace and you will get a lot of traffic to your forum. 3) find other forums that are related to your niche and make useful posts. Put a link to your forum in your sig file. Rinse and repeat those three and you'll get lots of traffic to your site. Feel free to pm me if you've got any questions about this. Don't worry I'm not selling anything. best wishes
Thanks for the tips man, I will try some of those out. I haven't tried the article submission, writing long articles isn't one of my strenghts, Engineering Major, LSU). I will go to some of those links and check it out. I am not trying to get some super forum in a couple weeks , looking for steady growth more than anything. I'll check out myspace to even though I have never been to that site. I'll pm you for some other questions later