Site is: http://www.collegecolosseum.com

Background: The site was launched this past May. Our traffic is sporadic. Sometimes we get a lot of hits, and sometimes nothing. I post on other forums with the link in my sig, and also make blog comments. We have also purchased adwords.

What can be done to help this site reach the first page for searches such as college forums, college forum, student forums?

Thanks.

What you want is very hard to get.
college forum - I think is the easiest keyword phrase you've choose.
college colosseum - is relatively simple because you have it in your domain name
I think that you should post in forums that are related to your target.
Blog comments should be ideas, opinions that would interest your target and that will add value to their information
You have to do SEO and Internet marketing.
I also think that you should make your web site look like a forum.
Try making some changes in your marketing plan.

One thing is you don't want all your traffic coming from search engines, because they change their algorithms all the time and with 5 mins of keystrokes on their end you can loose all your traffic. What that means is if you want 20 more people from search engines you should aim to get 100 new people all around.

Lucky thing is what you do to be noticed and bring non search traffic will help bring search traffic.

Blog comments really aren't a sustainable way to link build. But it's a good way if you're using college related blogs, to keep your finger on the pulse, and also to get noticed by people who care about the things your site is about.

There's more advice, but for now you probably want to fix this

National College News

College Topics On

Warning: fopen(http://feeds.collegepublisher.com/in...on_id=&poolid=) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error in /home/collegec/public_html/index.php on line 181
Error reading RSS data.

Originally Posted by Cratima

college colosseum - is relatively simple because you have it in your domain name

Nope "college colosseum" as a phrase is definitely NOT in the domain name, and even if it was it wouldn't help very much at all.

LearningNewbie - The feed is working fine for me in both IE and Firefox. I also checked it with another computer and it was working as well.

I'm not sure why you're getting that error. What browser/os are you running?

college forum is a hot words.
So you should take more to get high rank.
Good link and quality content are important.

IMO, college forum/s, student forums are competitive keywords which is hard to rank especially if your site is newly launched. My suggestions for this is just keep on promoting your site, blog about it, social bookmark it, get busy on submitting to thousands of directories, write an article, forum postings and any other possible things that might help even if the effect is huge or just little, it doesn't matter...

the positive effect after all your hard work might take sometime obviously depends on the performance. just be patient and continue on...

Originally Posted by collegec

LearningNewbie - The feed is working fine for me in both IE and Firefox. I also checked it with another computer and it was working as well.

I'm not sure why you're getting that error. What browser/os are you running?

Well it works now. Except the bullets push off the edge of the page, or, well, the content area anyway.

FF 2.0, by the way. It's the only browser worth using.

Originally Posted by Learning Newbie

Well it works now. Except the bullets push off the edge of the page, or, well, the content area anyway.

FF 2.0, by the way. It's the only browser worth using.

Yeah. it works fine in IE, but FF pushes it out. I'm not exactly sure why.


Also, you said there is more advice. What is it?

Well, also optimizing related terms to your keywords could also help.

This would be answering to Latent Semantic Indexing a new factor that Google uses to rank a site. It is the association of like terms.

Tools that are available for this is the KeywordToolExternal of Google.

Good luck

Well I do have an adwords account with those "search terms" included. However, it only leads to a few extra clicks.


Also, should I add a robots.txt file? Currently I don't have one.

You might want to remove the session id's from the url for guest/spider view. I did a quick search on SMF SEO mods and found this one:
http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=353

Might be worth checking into.

Originally Posted by collegec

Also, should I add a robots.txt file? Currently I don't have one.

Yes ... but not for seo reasons. Most bots will ask for robots.txt, and your server will send them a 404 page they won't read. You'll save a little bit of server resources just by adding an empty robots file.

Hi

Ive seen that site before, seems you have redone it, it does look a bit better now !

Woc

This would be answering to Latent Semantic Indexing a new factor that Google uses to rank a site

LSI is NOT used by search engines to rank sites at all

http://www.highrankings.com/forum/in...howtopic=32881

especially read the articles at Mi Islita linked in the thread

I keep reading one person make a suggestion and then someone comes along and says thats not the case. Its making this a bit confusing.

Anyone have any other ideas? suggestions?

Anything you have to offer is appreciated.

A couple of suggestions are;

1/ Read some other replies from people who have responded in the thread to see who gives consistent advice and who gets "put right" frequently.

2/ Don't take advice from anyone with "expert", "master", "guru" etc in the forum handle.

Have a read through the Tips for Newbies articles at HighRankings.

chrishirst - To be honest I don't think I have recieved any real advice yet. Some people have made suggestions and then others have said that what they said isn't the case.

I also think the majority of responses are generic answers and not individual to my site.