Well here it is... SilveradoSierra.com -Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickups
This is the site I've been working so hard on. A big thanks to SeO and dcz for helping me so much. Please take a look at my site and tell me how I could improve.

This site, www.SilveradoSierra.com has the following items implemented:

phpBB-SEO preMod 3.0.06

• phpBB SEO Ultimate SEO URL
  
  • Ultimate SEO URL in Advanced mode
• GYM Sitemaps & RSS (using both the built-in feeds from phpBB and GYM)
• phpBB SEO Zero duplicate/phpBB SEO No duplicate
• phpBB SEO Related Topics
• phpBB SEO Dynamic Meta tags (added meta tags on additional page as well)
• phpBB SEO Optimal titles (I am using search_words_ignore.php)

phpBB Gallery 1.0.4

• SEO URL phpBB Gallery V1.0.3

NV recent topics' Version 1.0.5 by nickvergessen

• http://www.flying-bits.org

Forum SEO by stokerpiller

• Modified and adapted into sidebar and bottom of the page.
• http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=1813225
• This was done to add plenty of content on every page. I like the pages to be heavy with related text and spider-food.

Canonical URL

• Locking in the 'www' so that http://silveradosierra.com is not possible.

• Code: Select all

  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^silveradosierra\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.silveradosierra.com/$1 [QSA,L,R=301]

The site has no members and is brand new because it was just launched. I think the next step is marketing but I'm not sure where to start. Can anyone offer any suggestions on the aesthetics, coding, or SEO practices that I've used? Is it ready to start marketing? How can I get more members?

Now this is a presentation
You did a good job with style, now it's time to write a lot of topics. Empty forums are not very user friendly (you could show less at first and then open more when there are enough topics to display).

Online marketing is a huge subject, from what the experts say, we need a website that sells.

Anyway, I'm also studying this, and I use my website to do the job of course. I will share with you something I have learnt:

1. Change your site's title, if your site is about truck, then your title should also be related to it.
2. The design is pretty good, bots already visit site (is it really new? you got backlink from somewhere?). That's a good start and now here comes the theory: contents is king (backlink is queen? ). Anyway, having multiple accounts and start spamming your own forum with exciting topics that you yourself feel the need for a discussion. But keep in mind that you need to create contents that suit the need of visitors and not yours.
3. Participate in other active forums, like phpbb.com and phpbb-seo.com themselves and building backlink (clickthrough only not for PR.)
4. After you have a reasonable number of members, you can start send email to them. Always include an unsubscribe link so they can remove themselves if they hate you =P. Send email on a specific day of a week to create loyal visitors. A free script for this can be: phplist.
5. Analyze your competitors, why they have high ranks, what keywords they use etc.

That's it, not all but those are in my mind right now. Marketing is a long-term campaign, it won't work in a day or two, so always be patient =]. Anyway, good luck. dcz should we open an official topic to discuss marketing online .

iwanttobelieve wrote:dcz should we open an official topic to discuss marketing online .

We can do it in the Search Engine Otpimisations forums

UPDATES:

I've been doing a lot of tweaking and fine tuning for SEO. I also added a few extra modifications like "Topic Descriptions" that really members to contribute to the idea of "more content". Google is eating up my site so far and I'm happy with the results. I've started an Adwords campaign to promote the site and started networking on Twitter and Facebook.

I've been working on creating articles and have registered a few different accounts to give the appearance of an active forum. It seems ridiculous but a lot of the posts you see on my site are really me talking to myself with different accounts. Hey, whatever works right?!

That's completely ok. Hey your site looks much nicer than it did in my memory . Well organized and really give me the feeling of a truck info site.

However, I think you use too many images, which can lead to bandwidth problem if more users visit. Btw, when did you become a member of the PHPSEO team

Thanks for the kind words and suggestions.

UPDATE: Massive registrations happening... Many topics being created... Tons of pages indexed in Google...
phpBB-SEO is very effective!

Other updates...

• Updated engine to 3.0.7-PL1
• Updated Gallery to 1.0.5
• Added Chevy Truck Link Directory

See the latest updates at my GMC Sierra forums

@ SilveradoSierra.com
For anyone that is skeptical about running phpBB-SEO... do it. In only 1 year, my site, SilveradoSierra.com has gained a PageRank 3 and we are now celebrating 3,000+ Members!

This is proof that phpBB-SEO works fantastically! I have analytics information to prove that it works:

We couldn't be more delighted with this exemplary example that we’re doing our job well.

By monetizing our site with Google Adsense our site is bringing in ($$$) plenty of revenue to support itself and is growing rapidly.

Thank you phpBB-SEO!


Our top search term is 'chevy truck forum' for which we are #1 out of about 2,280,000 results on Google.

If anyone is interested in discussing other projects or collaborating on any other web ventures I can be reached at austin881@gmail.com

well done

Do not forget that you're the first one to "blame" for your site success, SEO is only optimization, and thus optimization of your efforts to continuously add good content

SeO, can you contact me about paying you to install the phpBB SEO mod rewrites on an existing phpbb3 install?