JADM

SEO is a valuable addition to great content and a non-SEO marketing strategy!

While some may suggest that SEO will not help with member conversion, increased posting activity, or quality of content created; this is somewhat misleading.

Effective SEO will, as a part of the overall effect, help *targeted, highly relevant, web visitors* to come to the site! As opposed to "less relevant" or "non-relevant" visitors.

This of course, differs significantly from some forms of blackhat SEO that actually use bait-and-switch of non-related content to simply get as many visitors as possible to pages related to pornography, etc.

They use a mass strategy in this case. Basically, if they get only a very tiny % of a very large # of visitors to buy their products, etc, then they can make significant income.

In stark contrast, a whitehat SEO strategy intends to deliver highly targeted traffic. If the traffic that you get from it does not help you achieve your intended goals, you may need to adjust your general marketing strategy, to help facilitate it.

With vBSEO, we optimize on a thread by thread basis, with the goal of bringing in very highly targeted traffic to each thread individually rather than focusing solely on driving all visitors to your homepage.

When these visitors arrive at a thread that actually contains information related to their topic of interest, this is when you have the ability to convert them to members more readily.

This phenomenon will happen at some level naturally with targeted traffic, but you should also have a clear "banana" on the site (as Seth Godin might call it).

The banana in this case, is a very clear, attention getting call to action, that helps you convert your visiting traffic to sticky traffic... which (in the forum world) usually equates first to a member signup, and then follows with repeated visiting and posting, etc.

Interesting:

Bottom line, this should not be a surprise, SEO can only optimize opportunity for folks to see the page. A good page without SEO is not likely to do well. A bad page with SEO is also not likely to do well. Kinda obvious, but worth remembering.

SEO creates an opportunity. Many other elements must be in place in order to *capitalize* on the opportunity.

Good read.

Findability vs conversion, I like it.