I am going to be re-vamping the home page, butit got us a PR3. It looks like the latest Google dance is about over and we are coming up PR3. That does not just help us come up in the search rankings on Googel, but helps us in directories, because a lot of them sort on page rank.
The page will get a lot of the text removed or move, and will become move of a "welcome, this is what is happening" page.
The meta tags will get properly done, and the page will get loaded up with key word phrases. The list of future topics provided some of that but we can work them in other ways. The news feeds are duplicated on the tech news page so it can removed, but not until I have our own feeds done so I can put up a short list of current topics in the forum. My strategy at this point is:
- Try and push the home page PR higher by getting more links to it.
- Push visitors to the page into the forum with promotions (see below).
- Use the page to take a run at our direct competition who are at or lightly above our PR but hijacking there keywords where they come up well in searcah results (more below)
Part of what we need is higher traffic in teh forum. That will move us up in Alexa. They already show us with a couple of spikes the put us in the top 100,000. The actually have us graphed. To get that traffic the forum needs to build up membership so that some of the thousands of unique visitors we got this month need to be convince it is worth their while.
A couple of things are going to help that. First are the RSS feeds. Standard feed will be available to anyone but for members, there will the ability to specify custom collections; get pre-formatted pages so they do not have to do the aggregation on their own site, and custome skinning, with their own stylesheet. All they have to do to get the extras is register so the we have a member id t store their custome options on the database.
The second forum builder will be a promotion in which the prize is a free web site. A sub-domain hosted by Experts Round Table, Mentors available in the forum to support the building and maintenance of it. All you have to do to enter the contest is register. We will also be developing a question to identify the demographics of our user, and filling out the suvey will get you two more entries. Then you get one additonal entry for each new topic you start in the forums (subject to Mentor approval so there is no spamming).
Now as for the search engine strategy. What we have looked at is going after highly competitive key pharses, and that is fine as far as it goes, but I want to refine it a bit. I want to target site offering tech support, who we can beat. We can't knock of EE at this point because they have a PR7 and a hundred page to one advantage. However we can take on sites with PR3 4 or 5 like coding forums, HTML forums, perhaps even echoecho; and we can definite kick the hell out of a lot of the small specialized forums.
Instead of looking for the big hit key words, I am going to look at the natural key phrases that are in our topics, and see which competitors come ahead of us on them. Then I am going to duplicate most of their keywords. That will not necessairy put us ahead of them, but it should put us close enough that as the weight of links pushes us up in PR we move ahead of them. That is not to say we are going to abandon the broader highly competitive key words, but just that we are going to concentrate in getting users who are already forum users, and then grow into the broader space where we are grabbing the first timers. We still do not have the weight to come high in search list against the big player like EE, but neither do the other small forums. Yet those small forums come up in enough specialized searches that it is obvious that they have the right key words. We will just borrow their keywords, and perhaps enhance them a little.
