SEO strategy for content rich but small forum

[JADM]

One thing I have been curious about. My site right now is basically three things: A place for folks to find references (attachments), a place for me to explain concepts/important ideas, and an area for me to respond to others questions. Some members are posting and having conversations with each other, but most of the content is from me. As a consequence, I think I have keyword dense, high quality posts. Over time, my board may change into more of a give and take discussion with members talking about their experiences going through military disability process. But for now, with only 123 active members, and probably 10-15 who post, this is how things are for now.

I wonder how this impacts my SEO strategies. Any thoughts on what is different about this type of board? Or what I should be thinking about? One worry I have had about a subject that I don't really understand is if I can end up with a problem with too many keywords or a bad ratio of keywords to other content. I don't want google to look at my site and think it is a bunch of pages with the same keywords over and over again to try to manipulate SE algorithm. Is this a legitimate concern? Thoughts on how to address it?

[Joe Ward]

I think you are in the same situation as any start up forum where high quality posting (and posting itself) will be dominated by you and your team (if present).

Overall, this is good. If you are simply creating new content around your niche, I do not believe this will lead to any type of penalty due to overuse of keywords. Each of your threads should contain significantly unique content; otherwise, you would not likely have created it.

One SEO tip you might consider is doing keyword research to determine what related terms people are searching for, at what frequency, and how stiff the competition is for those particular terms.

You will be able to find 100s, or even thousands of terms, that are related to your niche, and with lower levels of competition that primary keyword targets.

While they may have lower monthly search volume, they are easier to rank for. Inserting these words into your posts perhaps in place of (or in addition to) the other terms will help you start accumulating small incoming traffic from these multiple sources.

This is what is referred to as the "long tail of search". Basically, accumulating a larger volume of traffic, but harnessing small search volumes from a larger number of terms.

With vBSEO, we focus greatly on this ability of forums. Due to the large amount of naturally occurring terms in the user generated content, optimization on a thread by thread basis helps to deliver long tail search traffic.

People don't always search for the optimal keywords. They search for vague concepts using keywords pulled from their own unique experiential background. However, webmasters do not often account for this. They use keyword terms of authority only.

But who says the user will know these terms? And, if they don't, how will they ever find your content by search alone?

Have you ever, as a child, asked an adult how to spell a word and they asked you to check a dictionary?

This is prime example of how the authority expects the non-authority to find information with insufficient preliminary data available.

Certainly the child can eventually find the word in the dictionary, as long as it matches it phonetic sounds. However, this requires much more work than simply identifying the correct spelling for them.

On the Internet, we cannot afford creating extra work for our users. When we do, our competitors will not. As a result, user's are lost to those who accommodate.

So, find out what the users are searching for (from their own experiential background), and accommodate them by using the terms that they are actually using in combination with the authoritative terms.