What would your Seo tactic's be for this

[Lukescotty]

Hiya guys...

Just a quicken, So my forum, talknightlife.co.uk is currently 10th on google for "nightlife forum" I have about 15 back links, 26 page autority. Now what i'm trying to do, which everyone else is doing, is trying to move it up a couple of spots maybe to 5th or something.

What would your tactics be, I'm disregarding all the crap I read in the forums etc, you guys on here tend to have the best explanation.

Let it rip

Cheers guys

Luke.

[Lukescotty]

Hi guys, thankyou for your responses, I'm taking it all in, and just thought of something which may draw users in

"Make your website something that offers real benefit to your site visitors."

Its a nightlife forum, so people look for stag and hen information, I've emailed a couple of stag and hen companies to see if they'd give discount to members via my site.

So if i was to create a locked section, "stag and Hen discounts" and make so they need to post maybe 5 posts, to auto unlock the section.

its a win win, I get post contributes, and the user gets discounts!! just thinking of something else other than just stag and hen, in this way.

what you think?

[danatanseo]

Great comments and well-said Ade. I just had an "Aha!" moment. You said:

"Make your website something that offers real benefit to your site visitors."

I am an in-house SEO for an audio/video equipment and installation retailer. We spend a lot of time and effort making sure we have great service and great products. We spend hours and hours talking about our value proposition....

We talk and talk and talk about how our products can benefit customers....

What we've never yet discussed is "What can our Website do for our visitors? What kind of experience is it giving to visitos? What reason are we giving visitors to stay on our site and stay engaged?"

Sure, great people and great products are crucial, but people go to Norstrom's not just for great products, but for the experience of shopping in their stores. Aha!

[AdeLewis]

Hi Luke,

To start off with I would completely forget the traditional idea of what SEO is. Forget about back links, page authority and rankings.

The first stage is to have a kick-ass website. Great design with well written and engaging content. Make your website something that offers real benefit to your site visitors.

Secondly make sure that your site visitors can share your site content via social media. Looking at your site, twitter, facebook and google+ are the easy options. You have a button on your site so that people can connect with you on facebook but also make sure that people can 'Share' your content. Cultivate and grow your followers, maybe run a monthly 'Like Me on Facebook' or Retweet competition where the winner gets a couple of free nightclub tickets.

Once you have done both of these things then you will find that your back link volume and domain authority will start to go up.

One thing that you absolutely must do is to make sure that you are ultimately trying to rank for the right keywords. Keyword research should be the foundation that you build any SEO efforts on. A quick check on the google adwords keyword tool will show you that 'Nightlife Forum' only has an average UK search volume of 12 searches per month.

Once you have your great site and you are sure of your keywords then make sure that your on-page optimisation is taken care of. SEOMoz have a great tool in the 'Research Tool' section of this site that can help with this.

If you are serious about getting to grips with SEO then there is a really good training course by Distilled that you can sign up to. http://www.distilled.net/u/

Hope this helps.
Ade.

[matbennett]

Out of interest, does that term bring you much traffic? One of the biggest mistakes you can make in SEO is to focus on keywords with limited potential.

However, let's assume lots of people are searching for that phrase.

Forums are hard. Free form forums rarely create blinding content. They can have a great community, but the content itself rarely screams "link to me".  One way around this is to use the community to help you create additional stand out content. Methods like surveys are built for forums. That could lead to something like:

• Poll members on something interesting
• Create static page highlighting the survey and its results
• Put out press or maybe an infographic to generate links

Another thing that could work well in your niche is something like a "readers choice" award. Get people to nominate their favourite clubs then throw it open to votes. Be sure to let the shortlisted clubs know that votes are being sort. You'll be surprised what links and social signals that can generate.  Again, put out press to announce the winner, maybe give them a badge etc.