How to get my site out there! [Archive]

BabyJack

08-24-2008, 03:56 PM

Howdy! I was wondering how to get my forum active & have lots of posting going on, like CodingForums...

What is the best idea? I've got affiliates, and link exchanges going on.. but We've only got 6 members since, last week...

BabyJack - http://www.wifeee.com

VIPStephan

08-24-2008, 04:05 PM

Howdy! I was wondering how to get my forum active & have lots of posting going on, like CodingForums...

With time and patience. Plus, a good subject and some unobtrusive advertising does help.

What is the best idea? I've got affiliates, and link exchanges going on.. but We've only got 6 members since, last week...

Oh my, you can't expect to get a thousand members within one week. CF has been online for a few years now, and it probably came online when there wasn't much competition. Nowadays with millions of more or less useful forums and social networking sites you don't generate as much attention anymore. So you should definitely have some good subject that makes people come and stay.

Additionally there is a sub forum here where you can ask for and hire forum posters that contribute for money to start some discussion.

BabyJack

08-24-2008, 04:11 PM

Thanks, but there's about 5 visitors on at 1 time who just come and go without signing up. How do I get them to sign up?

Celtboy

08-25-2008, 06:55 AM

Well while some of the other vets can give better argument than I, a site doesn't become an instant hit.

Back in the day, I accessed the forums here via WebsiteAbstraction, now javascriptkit.

There was a ton of CONTENT on the site. Scripts. Tutorials. Cool stuff. It wasn't just a forum. The most popular forums on the internet tend to have a large amount of a specific type of content associated with it. Yours....only appears to have forums. That may be a stumbling block.

-celt

SSJ

08-26-2008, 07:04 AM

Spend some money on paid advertising on other forums and board and be active yourself on other relevant forums and put your forum on signature. You will definitely get traffic for sure..

Millenia

08-26-2008, 10:09 AM

You can't expect a website to be popular overnight.

Make sure your meta tags are good. With good keywords and a nice description.
Try and find more affiliates. Target a bigger website, with forum signatures or even paid advertising. Also, you might want to add more forums, so you can target a wide range of people, but not too many. maybe a couple more.

oracleguy

08-26-2008, 04:11 PM

Well while some of the other vets can give better argument than I, a site doesn't become an instant hit.

Back in the day, I accessed the forums here via WebsiteAbstraction, now javascriptkit.

There was a ton of CONTENT on the site. Scripts. Tutorials. Cool stuff. It wasn't just a forum. The most popular forums on the internet tend to have a large amount of a specific type of content associated with it. Yours....only appears to have forums. That may be a stumbling block.

-celt

Exactly, that is in fact how I came to these forums, I had used some scripts on WebsiteAbstraction and then saw they had a decent forum section for help too. It was plenty active back then (late 1999, early 2000) so I signed up to get some help.

You need to add some more content to your site to help draw people in.

BabyJack

08-26-2008, 07:02 PM

You can't expect a website to be popular overnight.

Make sure your meta tags are good. With good keywords and a nice description.
Try and find more affiliates. Target a bigger website, with forum signatures or even paid advertising. Also, you might want to add more forums, so you can target a wide range of people, but not too many. maybe a couple more.

How can I add meta tags in PHPBB3?

Millenia

08-26-2008, 07:17 PM

How can I add meta tags in PHPBB3?

Currently your site is no where near on the front page of Google, that's probably why. On your theme/template/skin's index.php or header.php etc , in the <head> tags, is there any meta tags? Or even on your AdminCP is there any options about Meta tags?

jerry62704

08-26-2008, 07:18 PM

How can I add meta tags in PHPBB3?

Go minimal on the meta tags. They don't help you and they can hurt you. In the old days, they were used and abused to the point that major search engines ignore them or down grade you because of them.

What they are looking for now is content and titles. Make your title as descriptive as you can. Include all the keywords in the first paragraphs. Don't try to be cute and have a very small font or same color text as background to put in extra words. The engines know of this trick and check for it.

If you have a graphic, make sure you have alt and title attributes for it and they can be pretty long.

One of the best ways to get up in the search order is to have a number of links TO your page and they can be reciprocated back, but if you have too many the engines will ding you as a lower rater. BTW, they are also familiar with dummy round-robin links to sites that are only there to link to you.

VIPStephan

08-29-2008, 07:49 PM

site is cool.It is similar to our site.

And that’s the problem of today’s state of the internet. There’s just too much competition to really draw attention. Back in the days of WebsiteAbstract (I wasn’t even connected to the internet in ’99) there were just a few sites with such specific content so whenever someone searched for something you were more likely to be brought to one of those few sites. Nowadays every amateur can have a website and a forum and a chit chat area on his website, with more or less useful content, and everybody makes use of it, and there are so many Sims blogs, websites, forums out there that it hurts “business” more than it helps.

My opinion is: If you don’t have anything distinctive to say/offer then it’s better to not say/offer anything at all. But I’m probably not entrepreneur enough.

You would at least have to extend the site to provide downloads or mods or extensions of the game along with some really interesting news about the game and its development to have something that makes people sign up. Also, maybe an MMORPG kind of section would be useful but I don’t know whether such thing exists for The Sims. A site that would be like what I imagine and what you should have as measure is http://simtropolis.com which is dedicated to SimCity.