what's wrong with my forum?

It doesn't take off

[specter]

hello,

Started a brand new forum as of august, 22;
installed an url rewrite mod to have plan urls as of september, 06;
Got 200 of 250 topics indexed on Google (for my country datacenters, not google.com)
Getting a dozen of inbound links from blogs and forums.

HAVE ONLY 5 UNIQUE VISITS PER DAY!

What's wrong with my forum?
doesn't G love forums in general,perhaps?

very frustrated...Please,help me out...

THANKS :)

[netchicken1]

I am getting 4000 per day, at least 1/3 striaght from google search.

I don't have friendly urls as I am afraid of getting duplicate content errors, and google indexes them OK as it is.

But I had to do a heap of optimising for the seearch engines to get that.

[Maxnpaddy]

specter, don't panic as slow starts are normal for all forums.

Mine has been up for 12 months, and still hasn't taken off yet.

It has 100 members, 1800 posts and onlu gets about 5 members a day visiting. It gets many guests, lurkers and spammers (probably checking out how easy it is to spam) - but shows no signs of becoming anything great.

But the competition for forums is a large area, run by maybe 3 main runners and a few successful niche ones, so any attempt to copy those is pointless and result in hardly any visitors.

Mine is quite a niche forum, and thus not really competing with anyone, so it's tough. But it's tough to start forums anyway, and will be removing the forum in the next 12 months if the genuine membership doesn't increase to at least 300 real members.

Running a forum is fun, but very time consuming for little gain.

Just the way of the world I guess.

[RandomDot]

Perhaps your forum doesn't have any perceived value of participating as in : It's not interesting. It's not fun. It's just another forum.

If you don't have alot of people posting something interesting for the visitors which they would want to discuss or just have to comment on... then why should they join - or tell their friends - or do anything else than leave and never come back?

It's not about the topics, you could have a million topics and it wouldn't help you anyways - if nobody is saying anything and it's alive and kicking instead of dead and boring. Then it's just a million topics, indexed by google, with no value whatsoever.

Don't think about google and what google loves. They don't like you or anybody really. What is it that your visitors really like, what market are your in, what could make people just WANT be a part of your forum? Try thinking like that - perhaps your 5 visitors a day will begin to "this is too cool, let's tell everybody I know"

[rogerd]

Specter, read through the Community Building Library here for ideas on jump-starting a forum. Getting things going initially is the hardest part. It's kind of like opening a nightclub - if someone looks in the door and there's nobody in the place, they'll turn around and leave. You need to create the appearance of activity in the early going, and be sure that new arrivals get quick replies. It's really a "one member at at time" process in the early days.

[specter]

Thanks for your participation guys.

I totally agree with your considerations about forum contents and "look" and I ensure you that I'm hardly working at it; but in my opinion is not the point:

I'm not in the situation where have a lot of daily visits and no new registered users (that would happen if the forum contents are poor);
My problem is more basic:I have a shameful daily visits rate!
This means that only a few of the over 200 indexed topics get a decent ranking in the serps, you see?
Am I wrong?
Is this the real problem to resolve.
Even the worst webmaster in the world would be able to get better than 5 visits per day getting indexed an unique web page!

I expected at least a hundred of visits for the first month, but it seems like if I could achieve that results only in years...

5 visits are a real insult and in my opinion means that I failed completely my work...
But I need to know how...

[RandomDot]

Okay, look at what content you actually have. Then look at the browser window - what does the title say? Does the title describe the actual contents of the post?. Let's say you answer yes to the above. Let's just assume that.

Now look at the keywords in the title. Look it up on google. Both single keywords and in combination. What other sites rank on those? Let's say you did that and have that information available now.

Is your content really the best resource on the topic(s) at hand? - do they really deserve to rank in the top10 of the search engines?. Be honest with yourself. There's your answer.

NEXT TOPIC:

There's other ways of generating traffic than search engines. If you really have a good site, and the search engines just for some reason don't agree with you - then begin asking around with people for links to your site, participate in other forums and put your link there, use stumbleupon, digg, whatever you can think of to generate some more traffic. Nothing is a failure until you give up on it.

Sincerely and have fun,

[JS_Harris]

You could move the focus from the forum to the main site, on some sites the forums take off when the rest of the site has lots to talk about.

If Angelina Jolie launched a forum tommorow she'd have thousands of users on day one. The forum isn't the attraction a lot of the time, even on successful forums.

[Beagle]

A month isn't very long to get a forum going - it's not even very long to worry that you're not getting "decent" rankings in the SERPs. Unless you hit on something that's immediately wildly successful, both of those things take time - even if you're doing everything right.

This means that only a few of the over 200 indexed topics get a decent ranking in the serps, you see?

What exactly do you mean by "over 200 indexed topics"? To me, a "topic" in a forum means a thread that someone's started to get a discussion going; if you get 5 visitors a day, they've been very busy to make over 200 threads already! Or do you mean that you've written content/started a thread on each topic and want people to respond to what you've said? If you're talking about over 200 articles, then you definitely want to follow the suggestions about checking keywords. In that case, you wouldn't be dealing so much with a forum as with a content site (for SEO purposes, at least).