How to climb rankings, specific

Hi there,

I have a specific question on how to climb Google (etc.) rankings. To not speak in riddles but give you the details: my site / forum is about the music band The Cure.

When I search for "the cure forum" my forum is on #2 (which is bad enough, the forum on #1 is almost dead and I don't understand how and why they stay in front of us), same for the search "the cure fan forum".

What do I have to do to appear on page one when people search only for "the cure"? When you do this there is no forum by far at all. I know this might be a difficult question to answer. But maybe you can give me some ideas and a basis where I can start to optimize things to become #1 when you search for "the cure forum(s)" and how to appear on page 1 when you look for "the cure" only.

Any help is much appreciated. Thanks!

P.S. I asked about this issue over at vbulletin.com but didn't get any help: when I search for "the cure forum" the result doesn't show my meta description but the content of a certain thread. Any ideas how I could fix this and show the meta description in all cases? Thanks mates!

Hi Christian, was just dropping by vbseo today...

Firstly, "the cure" is too common and generic a keyword for your forum to come anywhere close. What makes you think people searching for the cure aren't searching for a disease cure? So i don't see any way you can come anywhere close unless you have several (many hundreds) very high (PR5+) pageranked sites linking you with the keywords "the cure". If you can get that then well.....

the cure forum is more realistic. But your competitor has been in the niche for about 4 years now whereas your site looks new. He has several thousand pages indexed all definitely having the cure forum related keywords. Still it's possible to trump him. I suggest you analyze his backlinks. Look up his backlinks at yahoo and if you can spot well known bloggers / websites in your niche who have linked to him, try and contact them and see if they can share your link too... You would be surprised how many ppl will link you if you only ask them! That's just one of several things. Another thing i noticed was that your homepage takes forever to load. Try and optimize your site for speed...

Cheers!

Hi Sadik, thank you very much for your detailed reply!

You are right, my site is a little younger and I had some disadvantages in the past that I try to make up by now. Your hints match my ideas. And I already started to focus on the cure forum. Since some time I am working on building up backlinks, and indeed we get more and more. I will try to contact more other sites personally and ask them for link exchange etc. In the German forum here at vBSEO I got the tip of using the relevant replacements which I will do as well. And after that I think only continuous good work and some patience can help ;-).

What is surprising me is your comment on loading times. The forum is not very heavy, it is running on a dedicated managed server with 4GB RAM, fast uplink etc. The forum itself should be pretty lean and only last weekend I did all possible alterations recommended here: Articles - vBulletin 4 Optimization. Not all of them, as some are not possible due to the managed server. The latest loading time from my ACP are 0.43 0.51 0.50. Maybe it's possible to have it faster, but that isn't so bad, is it? Do you have any other tips for me?

Thank you very much and cheers!

By page load I don't refer to your server's load. what i referred to was the http page loadtime. You should get Google's page speed addon for firefox and analyze your site's load time. Here's the link Page Speed Home

This is a good tool:
WebPagetest

Thank you both very very much, I am on that!

Not exactly about loading times, but what do you think of vB Optimise, does this make any sense?

I haven't used the new version, but the old one was pretty bad. In fact, it's still locked on my system. If i remove the product, even disabled, my whole site goes down. Haven't had time to figure it out yet.

I use vBOptimize pro and currently beta testing the new CDN integration.

Works perfect for me and saves millions of DB Queries for me.

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

This is a good tool:
WebPagetest

My forum got like 80 out of 100 at that tool..... how bad is it?

I wouldn't be worried about the score so much as trying to do everything they suggest as much as you can to optimize areas.