YOUR top 5 tips for optimising forums

What are your top 5 tips for getting a forum ranked well long-term?

Please feel free to be quite detailed. If you're short on time, and reading this, at least reply with a few short notes.

All the best

 

1. Get your members to link to you from their pages; give them a little reward or something.

 

Phrase the meta description with targeted keywords first.

Keep the meta description short and sweet

Targeted keywords in your thread titles

Keywords in the first and second sentence of the post.

Use something like photobucket to host your image. Rename the images to targeted keywords, such as keyword1-keyword2-001.jpg. Watermark the images with your website name. Post the images in your forum.

 

What does that do Kevin?

 

It optimizes your site for google images, and it tells google "what" those images are about.

Lets say your looking for pictures of a ford mustang. Which image do you think is going to rank better in google images:

picture0001.jpg
ford-mustang-001.jpg

This gives your post keywords in the title, text and images.

 

I understand about renaming images to targeted keywords, but why do you advise the use of Photobucket? Does that confer some advantage I'm not aware of?

 

Because photobucket has a higher page rank and the domain is aged better then your site.

 

Wouldn't it send them to the photobucket page and not necessarily the forum page? Good idea though, I like it.

1. Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools
2. Install Sitemap Generator
3. Submit sitemap

 

Ahhh,

That's what I was asking actually. Thanks fella. I'll try that.

 

In google images, the first page you see should be the page where the image is posted - meaning the webpage. Then you can go to the image source.

 

Genius Kevin!

Can you estimate about your traffic from using this method?