Joe Ward

Most likely, YOU, like many of us at one time or another, are guilty of this:

You build a forum about cars, and you want to rank #1 for the term "cars", right? Or a forum about computers, and you want to be #1 for "PC", sound familiar?

There was a time (over 10 years ago now) when you would have a better shot at competing for top terms on the Internet. Search engines were much easier to manipulate, and the content explosion was just beginning.

That time is over. Search engine algorithms are getting tighter, and it would require a top blackhat SEO expert and a *WHOLE LOT* of resources to even get close to the top of the results for the Web's top search terms. Nowadays, hundreds of thousands of webmasters have realized that a new business model was emerging, and jumped into the forum industry.

They now start and manage communities that continue self-perpetuating, that is, building themselves up with new activity and content like armies of rapidly reproducing ants... albeit really smart ants with computers and Internet connections. We refer to this as user generated content.

However, given what we now know about the long tail, would you be surprised to know that most forum admins are still taking a 10 year old approach and targeting traffic for their top, highly competitive terms?

In fact, let's not even call them highly competitive terms anymore. Let's call them dead terms !

That is, they might as well be dead to you, disowned from your interest. Why? Because if you are a mere mortal on the Internet, you are not going to get even near page #1 of the SERPs for the Web's most highly searched, highly sought after, and most lucrative terms! Forget them. They're dead terms.

Correct formula? Focus on the search long tail, and choose terms to target in your link building campaigns in which you have more reasonable expectations of moderate success.