Driving traffic to a forum

[paulocon]

Hi,

Anyone have any general tips for driving traffic to a forum?

I have setup a Self-Build forum at Self Build In Ireland Forum - Index.

I think it's a topic with a good target audience but finding it hard to gain any momentum....

Just wondering if anyone has any general tips for building/keeping visitors to a forum...

[blacknight]

Work on the SEO.

The session IDs etc., in the URLs won't help

[paulocon]

One more, thanks Blacknight..

I think SMF has a way of building URL's without session ID's so I'll do some reading up on that.

[blacknight]

I'd check out their module / extensions. There are a couple of SEO ones that may help

[Cormac]

Paul, if you google SimpleMachines SEO you will get some solid tips, but SEO can only take you so far. You need to work on SEM (marketing).

Links in sigs is the best way of getting word about, ask your top forum members to place a link in their sigs on the various boards they use. Make sure anchor text is used as to give detail about the forum is about. 'Irish PC builders' or something similar should get click thru from those who are interested.

I think sitemaps are the best source for SEO on forums, you can submit your rss feed to yahoo's siteexplorer as it is and you can get a sitemap mod for simplemachines fairly easily.

I'm not sure if boardtracker is available for simplemachines but if it is then you should jump on that ship. Ask on the simplemachines forum if there is a way to sydicate your forum threads/rss at all.

The simplemachines forum is really the best place to ask as they will have tried and tested all the techniques available in some shape or form.

[blacknight]

Originally Posted by Cormac

I'm not sure if boardtracker is available for simplemachines but if it is then you should jump on that ship.

Is that worth using?

[Cormac]

Syndicated content is always a good thing. Increased backlinks and all that lark... You asked before about getting the most of vBulletin's RSS feed and I was meant to reply with information on boardtracker but the reply button eluded me that evening and it lapsed out of my memory.

It's the closest thing to Technorati exclusively for message boards so why not. It's only going to grow too.

I setup an account before but I never actually completed the whole setup as I had things on. I wish I did.

[blacknight]

Ah, but I've already got Technorati crawling this board

[Cormac]

And you don't want boardtracker on board because technorati will get jealous?

[blacknight]

Originally Posted by Cormac

And you don't want boardtracker on board because technorati will get jealous?

I signed up months ago and never heard anything from them ....