Armchair analyst

Forums are something that I’ve had quite a lot of experience kicking off and I though I would right a post to share a couople of top tips on how to do it. So here is my top 10.

1. Pick your Niche

Probable by far the biggest choice you will make is what niche to build your forum around. To choose this you need to thing about what community you intend to serve. A forum is a tool to allow a community to effectively commuicate with it’s self. Your top function of a forum should be to serve that community. So how to pick a niche? Well the general rule of thumb is the bigger a ninch you pick the more compertition and the less use your forum would be a forum on for example:

• Animals is a bit vauge
• Dogs forum is better
• Yorkshire terrier will serve a very spefic community
• Yorkshire terrier that have lost one eye probable too small

I think all of these apart from the last one could have a forum built on them. The animal forum you would need to put a lot of work in to get started. The dogs forum would still need a fair amount, The Yorkshire terrier would work very well, wouldn’t require too much investment of time.

One fo the best ways to pick a niche is to go with what you are an expert in or are really interested in (i.e. want to become an expert in) this will help no end towards the forums success. I have seen forums appear in a fraction of the time it take normal one to appear purely around the knowledge of one esteamed expert (for example Arron walls SEO forum and Martin Lewis’s money saving expert forum).

2. Pick your software

Thier are quite a few software out their which your can based a forum on the two most popular are phpBB and vBulletin. Now neither are better than each other they are just different and really when you breaks it down not that different. These are the difference as far as I see it:

phpBB:

• It’s Free
• Simple Customisation requires coding
• Not very secure, tends to get hacked

vBulletin

• Cost about $160 for a licence
• Most customosation is a available through control panel
• Good active community providing mod and hacks.
• Forums tend to be faster (Better optimised)

I’m trying my best not to sound baist but I like vBulletin.

3. Setting out your categories

Some people say start your forum with only a few categories and add more later on, I disagree.   Your categories should be based on the needs of your community.  If you leave out categories because it will make your forum look empty, you will be left with a small and un-useful forum.  Also people will not find the forum until they exist, so if you don’t create them you sacarific a lot of traffic, that you probable need to establish them.

Pick your forum around the needs of your community. Predict people needs at the beigning, then if they don’t need them later on, merge the posts into another category.  A good forum has a lot of categories, they help people navigate the mess, don’t just create a few, you’ll end up with a mess that no one can find anything useful in.

I always have a few standard forum categories I add. Introductions, Chit chat, and suggestion and feedback.

4. Design

The function of a design on a forum is.

• Let people understand the niche at a glance. It is useful for people to be able to just look at the design and understand what the website is for and who it is aimed at for example this  Beauty forum leaves you in no doubt to what the forum is about. On the other end through Mezz forum, is just confused. The most simple way fo doing this is by adding a description under the title.

• Look like a professional set up. You really want your design to inspire confidence in the user, this isn’t hard to do, don’t go over the top. Just don’t look shabby.

• Look different. To build a community you need to  kind of build a brand. You need you site to look a bit different from the others, so that people know thier on your site and not just another forum.

seed the forum

Forums are like resturants, no one wants to eat in an empty resturant, because you presume it not going to be  any good becuase no one else is their, plus the waiter just stare at you, it’s uncomfatable. If your forum has no posts in it, no one is going to post.

Recently we have had to do a job cleaning the listings for a client who had had a abusive blog post written about him that appeared directly under his name when ever anyone searched for him. I though I would take this opportunity to write an guide on how we did it. So this is my guide to reputation management.

Step 1: Create as many positive pages as possible on high trust websites.

The first thing to do is create pages that you would want to be seen in the rankings. The key to doing this job quickly is to use the highly trusted website where a page that just has the words in the title tag will feature highly in the search engines. To do this

• Do press releases. (for free use www.PR-Inside.com if you can afford the $300 or so go for www.prweb.com the syndication is far better)
• Syndicate articles (publish the article to 10 or so site then the strongest will get picked up)
• Set up a profile on every social bookmarking site you can come across (facebook, twitter, myspace, squidoo, hubpages…)
• Ask/pay people for guest article on trusted blogs.
• Release a video to every video website you can. (I suggest you use www.tubemogul.com to get the videos out)
• Create a three or 4 page blog around the name on all free blogging platforms (Blogger, typepad, Wordpress…)

Step 2: Create your own websites.

Now this is an optional but it helps a lot especially if the search term is fairly competitive. Buy up domain name with the words in the domain name and then build a small website on them. Building a small niche website dedicated to the specific topic in hand with you can add good content to and build links has a really good chance of ranking very highly therefore pushing the unwanted results further down the listings.

Step 3: Link build

After you have got to this point you want to start picking the listing which you want to rise up. These you should start link building for, build links with the search terms that you want to rank on in the anchor text. So for example say you wanted to clean the ranking for the term “Mr big bucks”, and undesirable news report was in position 4 then you would want to build links to the result in position 5,6,7,8,9,10 and 11 at the very least. These links would really want to have the anchor text “My big bucks” or something very similar.

You need to then just keep building links this is the long part.

A couple of useful notes:
1. Over shot
If you need to move it off the first place aim to move it off the first 3. If you do just enough the chances are it won’t be enough. The google algorithm is a tricky thing, it might like some of your work but not other, I would really plan to do 3 times as much work as the minimum requires.

2. Don’t kick up a fuss
Do let anyone know and don’t tell the people that you are going to get them off the first page. You want them to forget about it and stop posting. If they actively start promoting that page, your screwed, for every one link they build you need to build one to every site you are optimising to show above them. Keep quite.

3. Check out their back links
If you are link building have a look through the backlinks to the site that link to the offending article. If you can get links from the same place not only are you boosting your sites ranking but you are hurting theirs, in a small way.

Hi Everyone, This is going to be my own personal blog and I can talk about the industry and just about anything else that interests me. So a little bit about me for people that don’t know me. I’m a London based SEO.

I you have any question on internet marketing or SEO please drop me a line thought the contact us page or just chat to me in one of the many forums I frequent.