Want to rank higher for the keyword virtual pets

Hello everyone,
My Virtual pets forum is currently ranked #13 on google for virtual pets and I was wondering if anyone here can share some tips on how I can outrank the other sites currently and rank in the top 10 because if I could do that, I'd get a lot more traffic from google on a daily basis. We currently rank for a lot of long tail keywords like "Virtual pet sites" and "sim games forum", so I'd greatly appreciate any tips that you could share.

I've been building links as "Virtual pets forum" and "virtual pets community" along with "Virtual pets" as the link anchor. I've owned the domain since 2006 and some of the sites I'm competing against have their domains since the mid 90's and early 2000's.

 

Introduce thread tags.

 

@Alfa1

We're currently using thread tags on forum tags, our users can tag threads, but we're looking into this plugin http://xenforo.com/community/resources/azucloud-search-keyword-cloud.113/ so that the tags display on the footer. Do you think that'll help us a lot?

 

Looks like a good addon. I might install it too. Does it automatically add tags/keyword to threads that are found via search?

 

I don't think it does. I wish it did though.

 

I got a lot of backlinks from pet sites, large and small that are currently in my niche. I added <h1>virtual pets</h1> to the main homepage the other day. I have virtual pets & sim games in my meta description. Should I implement meta keywords as well? What's the link to your seo article on here?

 

A little. It depends on your tags. You will need to moderate your tags database and delete low quality tags and make sure that you have relevant tags and that these are applied to all relevant threads. I give my members reputation rewards for tagging relevant threads with the important tags I define. I disallow adding tags by lower ranking members. Bad tags need to be reported for deletion.
Automatic tagging is possible if you really know what you are doing. Mess up and Google will mess you up. lol.

 

@Iconic installed the plugin earlier that displays the tags on our homepage/index. We were going through a lot of threads earlier adding tags to them. We don't have reputation yet on my community, but we do have a likes system. We used to have reputation though when we were running vBulletin 4. I hope this helps me a lot, thank you for the help. I really appreciate the advice.

 

You could add trophies for tagging x number of threads.