I got my hands on a pdf of the old, out-of-print book, "Building Online Communities" by Amy Jo Kim.

While the tech references are dated (from 2000), there aren't that many, and I'm really fascinated by her descriptions of the life-cycle of community members and fosting a sense of place, loyalty and belonging.

I ultimately am convinced that building my site is a multi-faceted process that will include both social and technical considerations.

The community I have is an old one; the site was started in 1999 and the forums have been around, although not all that time, still several years. It's been on vb since about 2003. But it's still relatively small considering it's longevity (i.e. about 12,600 members total, a little under 300 thousand posts).

Before I took over the site, growth had pretty much stopped. Despite several SEO no-nos, the site was well indexed because it has been around (and static) for years. Traffic was pretty good, but there was an 85% bounce rate. Lots of the features just didn't work.

Other than the regulars of the community, nothing really happened there. Without the forums, the site would have been dead long ago...So changing up and adding content helped, and the redesign, while it totally bit me in the behind in SEO, was very needed. Long term has been my mantra.

I know the former owner had some questions about why some similar communities had continued to grow, while ours hadn't...I think the answer lie largely in what I'm reading about now...

I'm totally digging this book. My background is in psych, and this aspect of the whole thing is fascinating to me.

To others who are interested in building interest and participation in their community, I'd suggest they take a look at this. A paper copy of this puppy can't be had for under $100, but you can get the PDF for under $25. :thumbsup:

My adsense revenue is slooooowly, sloooowly starting to creep up. I updated my plugins that allows for slightly better tracking: I can now see what page lots of the clicks are on. (FF still doesn't cooperate.) But it's still pretty low overall.

I tried to add a clicktracking script, but it worked poorly and seemed to lag the site as well, so I dropped that.

Ultimately, I want to continue to optimize my adsense, and then integrate alternative ads in there as well. I'm just doing adsense currently because 1. It's already set up, and 2. it's paying the bills.

I also need to develop some stuff for advertisers and do some direct advertising as well as contextual. Overall, my advertising/revenue goals for the site are to diversify so all my eggs don't remain in one basket.

I was also wrong about the traffic of the site...looking at traffic data from a year ago, I am still significantly below my old totals. Which is good and bad, I guess. It sucks that I lost so much with the redesign, but it's also good that my much lower revenue is, in part, coming from much lower traffic. And my traffic is still climbing, very slowly. I'm running about 650 uniques a day now...

I ran across an interesting new tool when I was perusing my list of linkbacks in analytics... Quantcast - Open Internet Ratings Service.

The traffic listing they had for me appeared too low, but I was very interested in the demographics they had, and it occurred to me that sort of info would be of significant interest to possible advertisers. I'd like to diversify from my "adsense is the only thing that makes my site any money, damnit" stategy, long term.

So I opted to quanity by placing their code along with my analytics. It hasn't run enough yet to give me more info (and it initially showed even fewer uniques, but i've no doubt some of it is just the process.)

I'll be interested tosee where it goes. I notice they adversitse some pretty heavy hitters among their signed up users, including wordpress and typepad, among others...

update- i found a post about this here- http://www.vbseo.com/f30/publicly-po...-forums-16771/

reading the site's methods, it explains they use a combination of publically avail information and data sampling from a panel of over a million tracked people. it seems reasonable to me. maybe they added info since that discussion.

I've been trying to take the LONG term approach to SEO, with the idea that doing little things, every time I can think of them, is more effecitve than doing one or two big things and then forgetting about the process.

So when I do my content in my CMS, I've been working on making sure all the links have titles with (hopefully) SEO-relevant keyworks, and same goes for image alt tags. I don't know if I'm going to end up going too high on keyword percentages, but overall, I think it's probably a good plan.

Not something for me to easily measure, but since I"m kinda a metrics-rookie, that's ok. I'm still learning how to measure anyway.

One foot in front of the other. That's what I keep telling myself.

Incidently, I find myself TOTALLY spoiled by vbseo's cool link renaming featue. I find myself annoyed when I cut and paste a URL into my CMS, and remember, "Oh yeah...vbseo isn't 'fixing' it up for me here..." :D

After installing the welcome headers mod the other day (and a great big, honkin' googlead next to my image header for guests), I'm ancedotally noticing some differences.

I did customize the messages for my userbase; my community is basically known for friendliness and supportivenss, so that's the tone I looked to hit and I think I was reasonably successful.

Linking to the intro forum in the "you haven't posted yet" message especially seem to encourage folks to post their intros. That's helpful for us in managing what's going on as it gives a sense of who's there and what their knowledgebase is. I often choose to feature different content on the home page based on what we have going on in the forums.

Signups are steady at about 4-8 a day, which is up a bit from our average of 2 or 3 a day. Not a ton by any means, but slow, steady growth which is enough for me now.

Traffic, likewise, is slowly and steadily climbing. I'm running back up to about 650 uniques a day, about 65% from SE.

Got my recipes imported but not published yet as every single one will have to be edited and cleaned up. I've got about 700 or so to do. Ugh. But this is a major source of my SE traffic and contributes a lot to the usefulness of the site, so I need to keep focused on it.

BIG on the to-do list: Optimize my adsense in the content. I've got it, but it's performing very poorly. Also, get my tracking better set so I know what's making me money and what's total dead weight.

Looking at the possibility of offering paid subs at some point. Right now, the only think I know I'll offer in this case is ad-free, for the whole site. That makes sense to me, if they're supporting the site through the subs.

I should be able to check who's clicking the ads through my tracking tools to see how much of it is from members anyway. I'm betting with my membership and the topic of the site, most of my clicks are guests.

Anyway, that's today's random adventures in marketing.

ok, following the advice of the fine members here at vbseo, i did some tweaking today!

added the welcomeheaders plugin, and changed the guest message to an image.

added the magical 336x280 adsense block next to the new image...since this is the only adsense size and placement that's reported to do well on forums (and my other experiments so far support that most don't).

and added vbseo RR for guests, including h2 and h3 tags, before the welcome headers.

so far, i'm pleased with my progress and have my fingers crossed they will contribute to my board's seo and revenue! :thumbsup:

trying to take the "little at a time" approach to seo. not stressed, but make it fun. like a puzzle to solve, y'kno?

i sucessfully managed to get all redirects working right, so everyone coming in with the www. prefix will get redirected without it to both the site and the forums. yay, me. :)

traffic is going up gradually. i'm currently getting about 600 hits a day, so i'm approaching levels pre site redesign. that's good news. bounce rate is also down from before by about 30-40%, so the traffic i'm getting seems better quality overall. and i'm getting a higher registration rate from the traffic thusfar...not enough data for solid comparisons over time, but that's the trend.

i'm attritubing some of this to dropping the vb archive and links to showposts in favor of using the vbseo sitemap for se's, and using permalinks only for forum posts. i figure the content-rich threads getting linked has to consistently come up higher in se rankings than the individual posts, even with fewer indexed...

my adsense, however, is NOT going up to the same levels as before, at about 1/4 of what it was. i suspect this is related to the differences in content that is available and the types of visitors i'm getting.

i have lots of content that still needs to be imported into my new cms, which is going to be a tech challenge and require a lot of manual tweaking...big time demands to get this up and running! this content (recipes) was also a big source of my former se traffic, so i know this will impact it. and since the recipes were visitor submitted and many of so-so quality, it was also probably a big source of exits via adsense... :D

next steps involve working on getting my content up over time and some serious adsense tweaking to see if i can't get that revenue up. if i can get my adsense optimization and placement set up effectively, then the traffic building will continue to help with revenue.

it does feel good to see the traffic trending upward, though. and for some reason, yahoo slurp is ALL OVER the site, every time i check. googlebot comes to visit, but slurp seems to be moving in.

oh well...overall, i'm satisified with my progress and will continue to work, tweak and ponder along the way...

Well, it's time. Probably past time. After doing web dev work for several years, I have my own site that I want to promote, so I'm learning about SEO. Not that I was 100% unclued before. But I'd never really gotten into it, because I didn't want to do SEO work. High stress with anxious clients. That's why I quit doing database work, for goodness sakes.

However, it's a different ballgame with my own forum and site to promote. SEO = Cash. Therefore, SEO = Freedom, from having to do projects I don't want to. And that I'm all over!

I actually took over a site with decent content SEO, despite the dynamic URLs and other various SEO no-no's. But the course of the switchover left me totally re-doing the site, without the knowledge or schedule to deal with the SEO consequences. As a result, I got majorly whacked in SEO, and therefore income. Thank goodness it still makes enough to pay for the server.

Got vbSEO installed, including getting the sitemaps up and running and am seeing some short-term results from that. Dropped the archive in favor of vbSEO sitemap-seen comments both ways on this, but one of the google help pages I read used forum archives as an example of dupt. content, and since I'm using a vbseo sitemap, I didn't see the need to have 2.

Next, I'm looking at trying to get Analytics set up in a reasonable way, and consolidate the pages. (It indexes forum root folder, and index.php pages as separate currently.)

New content structure was done with SEO in mind, so I have a headstart in getting that in good SEO shape, but I need to do redirects from the old content that's linked elsewhere to the current, corresponding articles. There are a few in particular that probably have lots of older links. The site has been around for a long time...

I did manage to do .htaccess commands to redirect from the old forum urls. Tried to do one to force the domain without the www. prefix, but members were reporting weird results so I took that out until I understand it better. And since I also have a shared login between vb and drupal (via vbdrupal project), I have a few users with weird cookie issues whenever I mess with that.

Anyway, I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually, but thought I might "think it out" here as I learn my way around.

I like learning new things, I swear, but sometimes, the sheer amount of info I'm trying to process it totally overwhelming. In the last 6 months, I've taken on vb backend, templates, dedicated server management, drupal, and now, SEO.