Site Promotion - Help!

[Alexjfinch]

Good Evening Gents (well good morning depending on which side of the earth you are )

I have recently undertaken a small project with a friend of mine - we have decided to create a forum dedicated to the photography profession from small time amatuers and beginners to pros showing off, its for everyone in photography.

I found a website called, www.freeforums.org, which supply a PhpBB forum free of charge for you to use, I bought a domain and linked it with the forum to make like easier getting to it (before the domain was www.snapshotphotography.freeforums.org - where as now its simply www.snapshotphotos.co.uk)

I would like to in the future, once I have built up a memberbase, move to proper hosting and a vbulliten forum (i prefer the layout) and away from this free crap.

However, I need to get my name out there, I submitted details to google on the site and on the admin page it tells me that google and yahoo bots have visited the site so I know the ball is rolling - but how do I get it that when I search for snapshotphotos my website is near the top, doesn't have to be the top just near.

My Father was saying something about changing the code with meta tags? - I dunno what to do with this because the forum is free and I don't know how much I can change - I do know I can add BBcode, would this mean I could add googleadsense?

Cheers for all your help

Alex

[Force Flow]

1) I don't think the forum host would look kindly on putting up ads on the service they freely provide. You will have to check the service agreement.

2) One good promotion tactic I've seen is to put the link to your site in your sig on the forums you frequent. On a web dev forum I frequent, many members do this, and on occasion, I visit the sites they link to for various reasons.

3) Here's a rundown of meta tags and what they are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_tag

4) you can try asking on the freeforums support forum about adding meta tags. I'm guessing it's allowed somewhere in the admin panel for the forums.

5) Try directing some site promotion questions here: http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=2 . When it comes to promotion, some techniques will work, some won't, and some will be completely bogus.

6) If you have a social networking page of some sort, post the link to your site there as well

7) Word of mouth is one of the best ways to promote. If people you know are interested in photography, mention your site. Although, handing out business cards might go a bit far. If people are interested, they'll ask for the link when you say "hey, I'm starting up a photography site"

8) lastly, it helps to have a brand that is unique. Notice how all these Web 2.0 services have unique and crazy names, sometimes intentionally misspelled? That makes them unique in a search. Your site's name...well...is far from unique, making it very difficult to stand out from all the other sites using those terms, as I'm sure you'll find when you do a google search yourself.

If you instead named your site shutterbugs4life; performing a search for that will yeild few results, making your site stand out in a search for those/that term(s).

9) If you want to go nuts, SEO is key. It's a lot of reading and a lot of crazy miniscule tweaks, but some people swear by it in order to get higher rankings in search engines. This guide is considered one of the best well-rounded articles on SEO, without including a lot of the false techniques that don't actually work: http://www.websitepublisher.net/seo-guide/


This was a bit of a brain dump, but hope it helps

[Alexjfinch]

Some absolutely superb stuff there!

I've been on the support part of freeforums.org and it looks like I have to upgrade to "Advanced" hosting to be able to work with metatags. Its pretty cheap @ £40 for the year - as opposed to hosting and then purchase of vbulliten, also they remove all the ads and let you stick your own in and it pretty much becomes your own forum. Google adsense could pay for that.

I have started to advertise on Flickr, facebook, messenger etc.

Its still in the development stage - I need to come up with more forums and get it more interesting I think.

Thanks for all your help!

Alex

[Statica]

To add on .. why not just go for reseller hosting somewhere and host your domain out at a bonafide web host. For example, I use surpasshosting and the cheapest plan would run you 48USD/year (32 GBP/year). You dont need to buy a vb license. Most good hosting companies have one click installations of the most common bulletin boards (including Phpbb).
The advantages are limitless. Firstly, you have the ability not just to have forums but to have a lot more than that. You could have blogs (again one click installation) or even design your site around a CMS. It allows you to do much more than have a bunch of people post threads and replies. It allows for more interactivity, like reviews etc. Not to mention having something for a foto site .. a photo album for users to post pix and have them reviewed.

Let's face it .. it doesn't matter what technology is presented or how much flash and adverts and banners and keywords you cram in .. it's all about the content and the ability to deliver the content to visitors efficiently. With the newer collaborating technologies like blogs, CMS' etc .. a forum might be a bit clunky.