Thanks delpiero.
I've now submitted the forum to all the directories listed on your website.
DMOZ doesn't send any traffic to this forum even though it is in their directory.
I've submitted to Yahoo, but they send hardly any traffic to the forum.
I just concentrate on SEO for google because they have the monopoly.
Webmaster tools are good for submitting or resubmitting and telling me the rules but that's about all it's good for in my experience, and google analysis is good for letting me know which phrases people are searching, so by using that i can create webpages to hit on the button of those phrases. But at the end of the day...i could spend hours looking at google analysis and not actually doing anything else, so lately i've been using this
particular tool in adwords to see how many people are searching for phrases within the UK, US, Canada, Ireland, Australia, Italy and Globally and make webpages specifically geared towards those phrases. Of course the webpages are against the webmaster rules, but they stay within the boundary of keeping off the radar, and if i was to stick to the rules there would always be 100 established websites ranked ahead of the forum for any phrase that people search.
Statcounter doesn't seem to provide anything that google analysis doesn't already provide, but as you say it's more accurate and i certainly won't dispute that, but I'm blue in the face looking at stats to be honest
So the current strategy i'm using is:
- Use that adwords tool to get the popular searched phrases
- Create a few similar webpages accordingly
- Use that search phrase in google to see where the webpages rank (after it's been indexed) and learn from that
While i've to create more webpages and wait another month or two to see results the
very early indications are promising.
We're better off ranking in the top 3 for 'fiorentina forum' even if only a thousand people search it, rather than futilely trying to rank on the first page of the index for 'fiorentina' even if
ten thousand people search 'fiorentina', because the thousand people that searched 'fiorentina forum' are looking for just that, a forum.
Ultras phrases are good too as people who search those phrases know more about calcio and are more inclined to join the forum than people who are just searching club names because their english team is playing them next week or whatever.
The one thing i would advise if someone asked me for advice is to take all those SEO advice websites with a pinch of salt, not sure how they can claim to be SEO experts since they don't know the google algorithim! Those sites where the SEO 'experts' give rating to the importance of each variable within the algorithim are a joke, as a variable that is rated important now might not be as important in 6 months and vice-versa so the collective ratings spread over time aren't relevent to today, and tomorrow it could be different again. Also, because google reacts different to different types of website structures, which can make their ratings even less relevent to this forum and send me off on a wild goose chase, wasting time concentrating on variables that are actually doing harm to this forums ranking.
As you know yourself, go with your own experience you've gained over the years as what works for someone else may do the opposite for your website. That's my motto anyway
