New To search Engines advice please.. Thanks

General advice on better rankings...

[classic house]

Hello everyone. I am what you might call a Search Engine virgin :-)
I started my site a month ago it’s a computer help forum. I used PhpBB to start with and read a lot about search engine friendly urls.
Phpbb was a bit hard for a newbie (who does not know PHP) looking to make his site search engine friendly so i swapped to SMF.
I have submitted my site and am now in position 9 in MSN. Position 54 and 38 in Yahoo. Now i have 37 members in 1 month are my rankings and the amount of members i have good for only 1 month? Or is it bad? Well actually only 2 weeks as i changed the software and re-submitted!

BUT here is the major problem in google i cannot get anywhere. Except in adwords costing me 5p a click.
Can you give me a novice some easy to understand general tips to improve my rankings in google. I run a free forum and the hosting and pay per click etc. Comes out of my pocket.

I have registered and made a valid google site map. I have made my search words as close to the required density as i can. But this changes in a forum as users use the keywords and they show on the index.php. I can’t stop this. Google updated my PR to PR2 a week ago. I have 29 back links for google also.

I have built an RSS feed for yahoo. Does google use this? Anyway Thank you for your help and advice sorry if i sound like such a newbie but that’s what i am lol Loz

[goodroi]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld classic house!

Make sure to read this welome page [webmasterworld.com...] at the bottom are links to some really good threads.

As for specific feedback for your situation, you need to worry about content and links. Get more members and they will mostly take care of the content for you. Just make sure it is on topic. Don't worry about keyword density. Spend more time starting interesting/controversial threads about your target topic and also related topics. This will get people to respond (just don't alienate your current and potential members). Recruit more members to post and expand those threads. If you don't have money for this, just attend a WebmasterWorld pubconference, Google normally hands out $100 beginner coupons (50 quid in the UK).

Get links, then get some more links and after that get even more links. Google Sitemap will help Google find you, links help your Google, Yahoo and MSN rankings. Don't worry about PR. Worry about anchor text and links. Good luck :)