Dingo Stew
Hi guys,

This is my little pet project. Its more of a hobby for myself more than anything else.

I created it to practice running a website and to learn some SEO. I've added the phpbb-seo premod, as well as a few other mods, inlcuding the arcade and a portal.

I've pretty much kept all the default theme as well, as I had issues when I installed other ones, ie the other mods werent compatible, and most importantly, nobody used them!!

As I set it up without a niche, the issue facing me is to create a niche! At the moment, the site is just a general, anything goes type of forum. As a result, I've found it very hard to research keywords since there's no niche! Words like "chat", and "Discussion" dont work so I find myself relying on linking to particular topics and using the anchor text related to that one topic! so now I have a lot of low ranking keywords and little or no high relevance keywords!

Should I try move towards some niche, or is there any way to apply good SEO techniques to a "general" site?

Cheers!

eoinzy wrote:I've pretty much kept all the default theme as well, as I had issues when I installed other ones, ie the other mods werent compatible, and most importantly, nobody used them!!

The best is pretty much always to start from either subsilver2 or prosilver to build up your site's look. It's easier to maintain (since these two are updated with phpBB, you don't have to wait for a separate update, that can also never be released) and, since having a unique style is desirable, it does not change much to mod on of these two or any other else.

A useful link for this is that one : http://beta.colorizeit.com/

eoinzy wrote:Should I try move towards some niche, or is there any way to apply good SEO techniques to a "general" site?

If you really do not have any specific content, then, you may be able to work on getting more user directly. In few words, if you where let's say a cheerleader, you could bring all the stadium to your forum. The example is trivial, but social networking (both online and IRL) can have a great impact on a forum, it just depends on how active is yours.

Otherwise, it will be a long run task with general content. Successful general content sites have success because they have so much content that it has become specific enough (for example, if you have ten topic about the weather, one about a celeb and one about a technical matter, you won't rank well on any one, but if you have many many more of each, some topics of each type will start to rank well). The more general you will be, the bigger your site will need to be to start being enough of an authority on each topic to rank well in SERPs. There is nothing much we can do about this, except providing with as much quality content as possible.

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