Ok, so you want to make a forum. It’s a great idea, creating a community for people to converse about a topic they are interested in. Meeting new people and maybe even earn some extra bucks. Its easy to get a forum running there are tons of free softwares out there to use and plenty of free good ones.

But now you have your forums up, people seem to sign up, but wait! no one is talking! Well how do i get everyone to talk and be active? is probably what you are asking yourself. Well the staff at ComputerBuddy has tried to compile a list of some things that may help out a LOT.

#1 - WORK HARD  on your own. don’t expect to have member even sign up if there is no content to begin with. you need to create fake members and post interesting topics every day making your forum interesting and make it look active.

#2 - Create a “personality” for your forum. Basically if you have a forum with a boring personality its going to be a boring forum and no one is going to want to stay. Here is a good example. V7N has created a personality of being the friendliest forums on the web and by god they are! because of this and holding to the personality they are a very very popular forum with over 35,000 views a day.

#3 - Contests - What better way to get people interested than posting a contest. offer a lil cash up for posting. But make sure that everyone in the contest posts good quality content. posts like “cool stuff” will turn people away instantly. but everyone is out to make a lil more money.

#4 -Strong site = Strong forums - if you are attaching a forum to a website make sure your site ahs some good popularity to it to begin with. people want to be part of a site thats already BIG.

#5 - Current News/Events.  Giving people up to date information or creating urgency makes people want to talk or respond to current events. its an easy way to get people to express their opinion.

#6 - keep your forums small to begin with otherwise it just loks like a lot of empty space. Also larger forums are harder to manage, especially by yourself.

So there it is. Put a few of these into the practice of creating your forums and watch the members talk it up. remember that every post counts in the beginning unless its spam. GET RID OF SPAM THE INSTANT YOU SEE IT! Spam means your not taking care of your site.

As an administrator of a forum you need to make it your obligation to respond to nearly everyone. if your not interested they are not interested.

CHEERS!

In this massive network of communities and businesses we are all trying to find a place in line that attracts the most people and fires our websites, blogs, forums, and directories into the position of a popular money making monster. Every person on the web wants to reach out to thousands of people, gain the top spot on Google, and above all else spend as little money as possible. In the hopes to provide every webmaster out there with a quality source to turn to for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) the ComputerBuddy Company has a few words to share about the topic.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

You can’t just jump into a topic such as SEO. It must be taken apart and analyzed to be effective. Done right this tactic could make a business while done wrong could make one completely fail.
Your Website
The first thing that you want to do is take a good look at your own website. Analyze the hell out of it because that’s what is important right now. Here are some questions to ask while looking over your site:

What is the main idea?
What do I want my site to become?
How do I want people to see my site?
What am I selling ($$$) or what am I offering(FREE)?
What kind of people do I want viewing my site?
Answer and write it all down for later reference.

The Competition

Here is the part of SEO that everyone misses. After you have figured out what your website is about go and find your competition because it does exist.

Say that your site sells ringtones. Go to Google and type in the keyword “ringtones” and click on the top non-sponsored link in the search results. That one site is the only site that you are going to analyze. You have to ask yourself why this website is #1 in the google results for the keyword “ringtones” (ill give you a hint, its not because of the site design). Look at the websites page source and take a look at the meta tag if you can. Take an important note of the site’s Meta title, keywords, and description. Once you are done compare your sites info (what you recorded earlier) to this sites meta tag and see if any of your information, even down to one word match up with any of the other sites.

Now you are off to a good start, you know what you want out of your site and what your site is about and you know what information the top site in your competition is giving Google.

Keywords

Because you have done the research for your site and the competition you should have noticed some similar keywords between the two. Note that any keywords that you use should be specific and not broad. For example, you will obtain better results for having the key phrase ” kanye west ringtone” rather than “ringtone”. The rest of this section will be discussed later.
Keywords should also be used in links placed on pages. Do not place a link that says “click here” because god knows how far off that is from your actual topic. Instead make it so the link reads “free ringtones” or something similar to your content. This way it shows search engines that the links are keyword rich.

Meta Tags

I don’t know how many people I have seen with ridiculously long meta tags telling everything on the earth but I cannot stress enough that you do not need all of this information. You do need a meta tag though and in order from most important to least important although all of them are important are below.

1.) Title Tag - It is the heading of the search listing, nearly every search engine uses the title part of the meta tag to list your site. So make sure that the title matches the idea and content of your site. For example, a site about ringtones should not have a title that reads ” Moes shop for music” or simply “Moes” if that is what your company is called. Instead it should read “Ringtones for sale - Kanye West Ringtones, Mariah Carey - Moes” The more specific your title is to your content the high it will be placed in the search results.

2.) Keywords - I told you I would come back to these. Each meta tag has a specific part for simply listing keywords. My advice simply separate every keyword with a space and nothing else. Next….Your keywords should match the text on the page and the title text. If your title reads “Ringtones for sale - Kanye West Ringtones, Mariah Carey - Moes” and your content has lots of stuff on the same subject have keywords like ” ringtones kanye west mariah moes sale”

3.) Description - Usually the little description that you see under the header of the search result are pulled directly from the meta tag supplied by the website. Go figure its importance should be self explanatory. This should also have similar keywords to those used in the title.

URL’s

As a side note
Make sure that all of the URL’s for your website are Search Engine Friendly as in the search engines can easily index your pages.
Bad Example of a URL - http://www.computerbuddy.org/forums/viewtopic?9879?_56.htm
Good Example of a URL - http://www.computerbuddy.org/forums/seo-article.htm

Backlinks, outside links, links links links……

The goal here is simply to explain that the more links that point to your website from outside websites the better. Good quality links on sites that are similar to your site are the best thing that you can get to help boost your PageRank and optimize your site. Link popularity is like the next big fashion statement for every search engine out there. Now the question is, how do I get quality backlinks in order to improve my PageRank?

Directories

Submitting to directories is one of the best things to do to get quality backlinks because search engines index there pages like wildfires spread. Below is a list of some highly recommended Directories that will really get your site moving.

Dmoz
Yahoo
v7n
01webdirectory
web-beacon
ComputerBuddy Directory

But hey don’t just stop there. There are lists and lists of free directories that will also greatly help so stop and go and submit your links……RIGHT NOW!

Don’t think that that’s the only way to get quality links.

You can:
Become a member of any forum or multiple forums - and contribute to the discussions taking place. Place a signature link to your website and you get at least one link for every posts you make.

Write articles - and give them to companies and article directories everywhere. Place a link at the bottom to your site and BAM! hundreds of links for free.

Write a blog - many people love to subscribe to blogs and if you have some good content to share put it out there. Every subscription usually counts as a link.

So there it is - Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 101.  Of course there are many other dodads out there to help in optimizing your site but I cannot cover everything on 100 pages so to get the most important ideas out there I give you this above article to read over and over again until your heart is content.

Welcome to the new and improved ComputerBuddy Resource Blog. The goal here is to attempt to provide webmasters all over the world with useful and relevant information towards, search engine optimization, website marketing and advertising, website design and developement, and the monster Google.

Subscribe to our blog today to get insider secrets on ranking higher in the search enginges and properly marketing and design ing your website.

ComputerBuddy Admin : Zenmaster