Tips to Promote your board.

[Songbird]

Another good one i have found is banner exchange sites. It has brought 30 people to my forum in 2 days. Works really well. Submitting to google won't work too good. You'll rank at the bottom and no one will find your site.

Sounds good, but how do you go about with this?

[Songbird]

Well you can stubmit a sitemap to google using the following url
http://yourforumname.smfforfree.com/sitemaps/sitemaps.php

Or a yahoo feed list by doing
http://yourforumnam.smfforfree.com/sitemaps/urllist.php

This lets the search engines find the content on your website. Your forum needs to have open acces to public in order for this to work

Are there any initial procedures for enabling access to public so that search engines find the contents of my forum / website?

[DC]

in the permissions of each board you have to allow guests to view

[Songbird]

]

The best way to do that is leave a link at a high traffic site and youll get a much better result than submitting it.

Can you please provide some more details on this method of promoting a forum?  Like, what steps need to be taken to leave my forum link at another site .. ?

[Songbird]

The following link exchange site says that they have 52 websites.  If someone puts all those 52 links in their webpage or forum, they will put the link of that forum or webpage in all their 52 sites.

http://www.linklots.com/

But isn't adding 52 links in your forum too much! ?

[Crasy]

Links Mod would make it easy

I'll look into it. Sounds cool

[Songbird]

Hmmm .. actually I'm still in the process of studying about Links in SMF tutorials.  Do these categories & links appear on the frontpage of forums?  If I am exchanging links with another site, do I enter the link of that site in my forum thru this process?  I feel a bit confused about it at the moment.

[Crasy]

PM'd.
Check your PM's

[Crystalman]

When I have an affiliate, I post their button on the footer, and have a board with their userbar of the site. (Check out my sig's picuture/link to see it!)

[Songbird]

When I have an affiliate, I post their button on the footer, and have a board with their userbar of the site. (Check out my sig's picuture/link to see it!)

Hmmm ... I can follow that bit about posting the button on footer.  But can one also post button or codes in signature?  I tried it, wasn't successful.  it was looking too small .. not like yours which looks very nice.

[simply sibyl]

can one also post button or codes in signature?  I tried it, wasn't successful.  it was looking too small .. not like yours which looks very nice.

Hi Songbird   

Yes,  you can post buttons, pictures, things in your sig line.   You have to use BBCode there.

(remember to take out the spaces.. i need to put them here so the code shows up right)

To post a picture in your sig:

[ img ] http:// url of the picture [ /img]

If you want to post a clickable button/picture:

[ url= http:// address you want user to go to when button/pic is clicked ][ img ] http:// address of your pic/button [ /img ] [ /url ]

[Songbird]

can one also post button or codes in signature?  I tried it, wasn't successful.  it was looking too small .. not like yours which looks very nice.

Hi Songbird   

Yes,  you can post buttons, pictures, things in your sig line.   You have to use BBCode there.

(remember to take out the spaces.. i need to put them here so the code shows up right)

To post a picture in your sig:

[ img ] http:// url of the picture [ /img]

If you want to post a clickable button/picture:

[ url= http:// address you want user to go to when button/pic is clicked ][ img ] http:// address of your pic/button [ /img ] [ /url ]

Thanks Sibyl  .. this will help 

[Laugh-nd-kid]

If you don't have a URL for the picture . Go to photbucket.com and register then upload it from your documents and then it has IMG , Tag and URL. I hope this helps

Littlekidder

[Crystalman]

Well, my site is desparate.

Almost 30 days up, a long time in Google, I did every suggestion I can, and It fails.

I have 400 posts, and 17 members. 4 of which, haven't logged-in in over a week, 3 have never posted.

3 members have over 20 posts, and 3 have over 50. (me included)

The rest are not active at all...

That's the gist of it.

I don't need members, I need GOOD members, ones that will post.

No one even puts input on the site! I have a sugggestions board, and many ways for the member to be interactive with the forum, and I added a guest board so guest can tell me what they think... and nada. only H-gage has responded in the last week and a half.

It's not because my site has bad content, not at all.

1. Member space: an Interactive feature that lets members have their own small forum, and be a moderator there.

2. Daily Sprite comic: A feat not many achieve, yeah, you can have comics, but DAILY? No. Most daily comic sites are their own sites, not a separate site, much less a forum.

3. Member-only Shoutbox.

4. Plenty of advertiseing options, including Footer pics, your own board, and userbars to attract members.

5. Every forum code this site has to offer.

6. Member comics: A chance to make your won comic, and host it on my site.

7. Comic Space: A combination of Member comics and Member space, allows you to not only have a comic hosting, but a comic history board, and forum.

My site has good content, but no posters! I've tried to do as much as I can... and it's not working.

I've subbmitted a site map to Google, but I have no Idea how to verify my site. It calls for a META tag, or a HTML file, and they have to be uploaded to the site somehow, but I'm really confused. So a site map is all I can do.

BTW, this is from google:

Sites' positions in our search results are determined automatically based on a number of factors, which are explained in more detail at http://www.google.com/technology/index.html. We don't manually assign keywords to sites, nor do we manipulate the ranking of any site in our search results.

In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages. For more information about improving your site's visibility in the Google search results, we recommend reviewing our webmaster guidelines. They outline core concepts for maintaining a Google-friendly website.

[CrocHunter]

Have you created a myspace page for your forum?  We have found that this produces fantastic results for us.  Google doesn't do much for us unless someone specifically searches for your site.  Frankly, there are millions of others trying to rank higher than you, and its near impossible to rank at the top unless you get high traffic and what not.  Also, the banner exchanges produce a handful of people per week as well.  Just google banner exchange for that one.  We used to have an smfforfree site, and by the time we closed we had over 120 members.  We have since moved to our own site with the SMF software and 70 of those members have followed us, but at any site, only a fraction of the total members will be regular posters.  We probably have 30 regular posters.  We are still in our beginning stages, but have been fairly successful so far.  We haven't even begun an all out advertising campaign yet.  Also, you need a topic or theme that appeals to people.  Perhaps you should simplify things a little more.  Too many options can be overwhelming to new members and they may not return.  Also, if you have some core members, enlist their help to advertise for you.  I have everyone on my board using word of mouth to advertise for us, and it really does work.  I hope this all helps.