First and foremost...

the introduction.

I'm a semi-talentless writer who decided there was a place in the world for a bipartisan forum www.americaoutloud.org

Before I decided on a name I realized this thing called SEO could make or break a site - regardless of how often you flooded and were banned from other sites (:( yes, I was that guy)

Well now I've been operating for two years with only a handful of people on the site.

I could use all help/advice/prayers possible to get it back up and running.

As far as SEO is concerned I went as far as removing the Vbulletin tag via the phrase manager - but that is about it.

My goal/target competition is www.politicalcrossfire.com I am not looking to make money from my site and if it does earn revenue at a later date - charity will see every last dime of it.

Where should I start guys and gals?

Hey Juan,

Welcome to the forums

I moved your thread to our website critique forum, because you asked for suggestions

I took a quick look at your forums.

Positive is that you renamed the tag / found your own slogan. Further you use your own custom skin which makes visitors to remember you once they come back or if they register they feel more comfortable. At least I do when I see that someone does his best to make a website looking better.

I don't like the forum structure. Why don't you merge some forums or make some visible for members only?
A guest doesn't need to be informed about the latest updates you did to the forum by itself.

A forum needs to look active and well structured. One of the goals for me as webmaster is to make sure that only important content is visible and that it looks like the forum is alive.

A SEO tip:

Why aren't you usting our free sitemap generator tool? This tool creates sitemaps of the content and *informs* some search engines that there's new content available to index automatically.

Thanks for the advice.


First things first - I need to set properties of certain threads only viewable to members? (I'm assuming this can be done in the ADMIN CP somewhere?)

second - free sitemap generator tool - no idea how or even what this is.

I'll check it out tonight though!

Thanks for the words of wisdom. I still have to do all the basic things for the site like submit it to search engines and stuff (at least I think that is still protocol).

I tried hiring someone to help me out with the site but that didn't work. Creative differences...and they wanted all the $$$ up front.

The best thing you can do for your forum (especially before you install our free sitemap generator) is to get vBSEO enabled. I'm lobbying you to do so, if it's within your SEO campaign budget.