Search Engine Visibility

[TechnicalFisherman]

I hope that posting this in the right forum. My forum "The Technical Fisherman" has been up for going on three months and I've noticed that, even when I search with words that appear throughout the forum, I can't get it to come up on google. The only google search that I can get it to come up under is when I google the forum name, in which case it appears first. I've added language to the board description tab under options, though I understand that google isn't meta tag driven anymore. I'm getting about 60,000 pageviews a month and have over 1000 posts, so I'd sort of suspect it would be coming up in google searches for frequently used terms.

Could the server directory structure have anything to do with this? The forum directory is in a another subdirectory, not on the root. I'm also using XenPorta as a front end and have a redirect to use the portal as the homepage. Or, alternatively, does it just take this long for google to begin "seeing" the forum from a keywords perspective.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

 

[digitalpoint]

For the terms you are searching on, would you consider your site one of the best sites in the world for those topics? Ultimately that's what Google is after... trying to return the most relevant results to the end user.

 

[TechnicalFisherman]

For the terms you are searching on, would you consider your site one of the best sites in the world for those topics? Ultimately that's what Google is after... trying to return the most relevant results to the end user.

Thanks - it's sort of a niche site, so for some very limited searches, yes. For instance our Chesapeake Bay fishing forum is one of a pretty limited number of forms for that region. So, I'd sort of expect it to come up under a search of the keywords "chesapeake fishing forum." But it doesn't.

 

[CTXMedia]

With just 360+ pages indexed you're not going to "place" anywhere above established (and larger) sites. You've also got empty forums and very little forum content for Google to keep coming back for regularly (lots and lots of work for you to do there!).

You haven't got a robots.txt in place and you're not using Friendly URLs (which get rid of all those /index.php?/portal) type URLs.

Your site description needs work too - for example "The Technical Fisherman is a site devoted to all things" is a lot of introductory words/characters that, in reality, just repeat your site title. Try to get the most keyword relevant description you can fit into 160 characters; it's hard, but a good challenge and one that can have a positive impact.

Hope this helps.

 

[TechnicalFisherman]

With just 360+ pages indexed you're not going to "place" anywhere above established (and larger) sites. You've also got empty forums and very little forum content for Google to keep coming back for regularly (lots and lots of work for you to do there!).

You haven't got a robots.txt in place and you're not using Friendly URLs (which get rid of all those /index.php?/portal) type URLs.

Your site description needs work too - for example "The Technical Fisherman is a site devoted to all things" is a lot of introductory words/characters that, in reality, just repeat your site title. Try to get the most keyword relevant description you can fit into 160 characters; it's hard, but a good challenge and one that can have a positive impact.

Hope this helps.

Thanks- this is very helpful. I will make the changes you suggest. In terms of being picked up on searches, I'm not questioning at this point why the site is not placing above any other sites, but am curious why it's not even coming up. Just want to be sure that there's not something that I've done wrong in terms of structure that's preventing it. Sounds like perhaps it's jut a matter of getting things better optimized and giving it time though. Thanks again.

 

[digitalpoint]

Thanks - it's sort of a niche site, so for some very limited searches, yes. For instance our Chesapeake Bay fishing forum is one of a pretty limited number of forms for that region. So, I'd sort of expect it to come up under a search of the keywords "chesapeake fishing forum." But it doesn't.

Looks like there are a lot of well established forums for that topic. As an end user, a forum that has a ton of existing activity and users is going to be more to my liking than one that is empty... Again, Google is trying to deliver results most useful to the end user, not results that are divided up "fairly" between all the sites relevant for the topic. For example a search for "Chesapeake Bay fishing forum" comes up with this (more than a million posts there already on the exact topic)...

http://www.tidalfish.com/forums/forumdisplay.php/1-Chesapeake-Bay-Fishing-Forums

 

[digitalpoint]

Also, it's probably not even worth worrying about keywords that relatively no one searches for (like "Chesapeake Bay fishing forum")...

If you look at the global search volume for that phrase, you get this:


Average month search volume at 110... meaning less than 4 searches per day out of billions of people. Even if you were #1 in Google for that, it would probably yield you 1 or MAYBE 2 visitors per day.

 

[TechnicalFisherman]

So, again the issue is not one with site configuration, but rather that the site is just not "on the grid?" It's only been up for 2 months so that's no great surprise or disappointment. Just wanted to be sure it wasn't a technical problem that I'd created. Thanks again for the insights.

 

[digitalpoint]

Nope... No technical issue.

 

[Carlos]

Thanks- this is very helpful. I will make the changes you suggest. In terms of being picked up on searches, I'm not questioning at this point why the site is not placing above any other sites, but am curious why it's not even coming up. Just want to be sure that there's not something that I've done wrong in terms of structure that's preventing it. Sounds like perhaps it's jut a matter of getting things better optimized and giving it time though. Thanks again.

Building on @Clickfinity's advices, go download @Jaxel's sitemap add-on.

Here: http://xenforo.com/community/resources/8wayrun-com-xenutiles-sitemap.2150/