Forum SEO

[••Gaming.Boards.net••]

Forum URL: www.GamingBoards.net


Hello, I've been recently trying to increase traffic to my forum. I've tried many things such as social media, using Forum Promotion websites, as well as post exchanges. I can't seem to really get a spark to last long enough for users to start finding their way to the forum.

My question is: Can anyone here have a look and let me know if there is anything I can do to improve my SEO, also, do you see any problems/flaws with my forum that may be drawing users away or preventing them from signing up?


I've used SEO scanners and it seems to be doing fairly well, but I wanted to ask the real Pro's here.



Thanks in advance!
www.GamingBoards.net - Gaming Community Forum

[Kami]

The primary thing I can see is a lack of focus. This is meant to be a gaming board, I can see that, but indexing bots are going to be looking for words that occur frequently in an organic manner (ie: not spammed) in order to decide which keywords are relevant to the website they are visiting.

Having a look at the stats on your forum, here is the average per-thread activity in each board:

- Runescape: 284 Threads, 1708 Posts = 6 posts per thread average
- Console Games: 81 threads, 513 Posts = 6.33 posts per thread average
- PC Games: 93 Threads, 305 Posts = 3.3 posts per thread average
- Mobile Games: 26 Threads, 72 Posts = 3 posts per thread average
- Old School Games: 229 Threads, 2216 Posts = 9.7 posts per thread average
- Coffee Time (Not Games) = 8 posts per thread average

Your most active board is "old school games". Your second most active board isn't even gaming related. If your goal is to be more recognised as a gaming-dedicated forum, then that not-gaming board is going to be skewing your results SEO-wise.

Some suggestions as far as course of action:

1. Decide what you want to be focused on. Right now, my assumption based on activity is that most people on your forum are interested in old-school gaming more than anything else, followed very closely by just shooting the breeze completely unrelated to gaming. Is this in line with your overall topic goals? If not, it may be time to figure out what you want content-wise.

2. The biggest problem I think forum owners have is the idea that a "spark" will come from adding more and more content, kind of like, throwing spaghetti at a wall and hoping one of the strands sticks. This may work for some forums, but in my experience a better route is to decide on a specific subtopic you want to focus on. All right, you want to be a gaming forum, but what is your primary type of game? What is the overall gaming audience you want to join your forum. Everything else is just icing on the cake.

------------

Some personal asides that aren't really SEO related, but may give you food for thought regarding member interest:

As a gamer myself, this type of forum is definitely something that *should* be up my alley but... it's not. I play League on a literal daily basis and it seems maybe like. Three people total play league on this forum, and none of the threads I see are particularly intriguing to me. There aren't any discussions -- Nergal likes to post things, it seems, that are like "Hey guys here is info" and "hey guys here's what I'm doing on league", but there's not much discussion to be gained from me.

Me, I'd be interested in seeing like, favourite AP builds, ways people break the meta, advice for newer players from forum / league "elders", favourite champ combos, stuff like that. Mostly what I see is... stats, news (that I could get from the league forums themselves), and one person's opinion on how best to league. What is this providing me that I couldn't curate myself, or find on the league forums?

And that's really the question for a gaming forum like this. All of these games already have community forums, barring say, the old school games. You've got general places like gamefaqs, and you've got the (former) BSN / the unofficial BSN, or Origin forums, or league forums, or the steam / valve forums, the Blizzard forums, etc etc etc.

What are you bringing to the table that other people can't get from these places individually? This isn't meant to be aggressive, but a genuine question. You're in competition with existing franchises that already have community forums. Some of them have community forums so large that they are literally paid positions and an entire separate department just for community interaction.

Why should gamers choose this forum, instead of any other forum out there?