How can you increase your forum traffic?

[Dr Mindbender]

The members of the Human progress group will be aware of ACT, the anarchist, communist technocracy forum that Serpent and i are admin-ing.

I would like to get the traffic up though as it is nowhere near where i would like it. Does anyone know how to improve traffic short of sheer publicity, like increasing your place up google searches for example?

[Louise Michel]

The members of the Human progress group will be aware of ACT, the anarchist, communist technocracy forum that Serpent and i are admin-ing.

I would like to get the traffic up though as it is nowhere near where i would like it. Does anyone know how to improve traffic short of sheer publicity, like increasing your place up google searches for example?

The three factors in Google placing are incoming links from sites with a similar content, your actual site content - ie relevant information - and relevant keyword usage in page title tags and near the top of your pages.

The most important thing is incoming links. Of course links will also increase traffic in and of themselves. But for Google they have to be from related sites so a link from revleft is good but a link from a site selling luxury cars is completely useless. Links from forum postings also count and also they help you anyway.

Relevant articles about anarchism etc. will help because they increase the site content. Make sure you use text links to these articles because the Google spiders follow text links efficiently (as opposed to eg javascript).

Don't know if you know HTML but there are things called Title Tags where you define the content of your page. It's often what Google shows when you do a search and get some text with a link. Make sure your pages have a good title. Also put a brief article at the top of the home page with words like anarchism and communist and technocracy. Also think about what someone might search on when looking for a site like yours and include those words.

A good book on this is Search Engine Optimization For Dummies - you can probably find a cheap second-hand copy of this on Amazon or there may be a ripped-off PDF version somewhere on the internet.