Where To Begin???

I have a website which brings in traffic of 1-2 million hits and 40-60000 unique visitors per month, the forums mainly I assume account for the majority of the close to 80000 pages I have indexed on google.

The front end is in dire need ( and will slowly start to receive) renovation, and is presently all in very basic html. The forums are all in phpbb.

It is my major aim for this year to flow more of the traffic towards the forums and encourage members to sign up, post and become regular members of the community.

I have become dizzy with the high amount of SEO guides I have glanced at..unsure whether to focus on html tags, phpbb seo MODS, keyword densities, image anchors (whatever they are), promotion, backlinks...

Can anyone point me in the most obvious first port of call?

home page- www.weedguru.com
forum index- www.weedguru.com/forum/index.php

Cheers for anyone who chips in,
D
Where to begin????

 

if you want to bring more traffic to your website but also look better in serps, forget about seo you already have an established website with good traffic - try to provide good content and reasons for people to come back and even suggest this to their friends. come up with new topics, maybe even a contest who knows. and if you do good, people will talk about you, will recommend you, will write about you on their blogs so backlinks will come, you will boost your serps, you will get more traffic

 

To start SEO you must start social bookmarking. it is basic factor of search engine optimization.

 

Well you already have a decent level of traffic. I'd focus on improving your on page and getting existing visitors to recommend your site via social mentions. Guide your visitors to the forum by having a call to action leading them to the forum. Put some 'Like' buttons for facebook, twitter, G+ and social bookmark sites on each page.

Most SEO advice out there is plain wrong. In simple terms, Google primarily ranks according to the number of incoming links (backlinks), however this is modified by over 400 factors. Each link has a given value which Google keeps confidential, so one can only guess at what that value is. With the recent changes over the last year, on page quality and the quality of incoming links have become more important. In terms of value for effort, a good quality incoming link will still out perform anything else you can do.

In terms of your site, I'd update your home page to emphasise your forum more, along with a highlighted link and call to action. Also do a spell check on your text .

Currently you need two clicks from the home page menu to get to the forums. Change that to a direct link - small thing, but still something that will help. Integrating the forum into your site better would also help - build a phpBB template that matches your overall look and feel of the site. A freelancer would do this for a small fee. Take 'forum' out of the URL.

In the forum, your URLs are of the format

By including the title of the thread in the URL, you are more likely to get long tail traffic. Example: The above should be changed to

or better still

I seem to remember there is a plugin that will allow you to do this. The number on the end is unique and generated by the plugin.

Titles are the most important on page element. You should change the titles of each post from this

to something like this (i.e. the title of the thread first, lose the unnecessary 'view topic')

There should be a plugin to allow this.
The same goes for the title on the non forum pages on your site.
Add social mention tags to each post - again there should be a plugin to allow this.
There are many more things, but these I'd view as the most important.