Attract people to my forum

Search engines want to provide relevant content so they tend to be hard towards people who try to "work" their algorithms. External sites linking to you are an indicator for calculating page rank, but only if their content aligns with your key words/content. Your links to external sites are judged in the same way. To many irrelevant links either way impose a penalty.

You used to see a lot of people repeating their key words in white on white text at the bottom of the page so the SE's would see them, but it wouldn't disrupt the content. The SE's dropped those pages entirely.

Bottom line is content is king. Some useful SEO things that tend not to change over time are:

• Key words in home page title.
• Keywords in first couple of paragraphs of text.
  • Other words in text should match words found on similar sites for your keywords.
• Content Text should be "high" on the page - as the SE sees it, not as the browser sees it.
  • A few thousand line of java script before you hit content is a bad thing.
  • Download the text-based browser "Lynx" to see how SE's see your page. Note that it doesn't see links embedded in javascript.
• Pictures use text desription that is similar to content/keywords.
• For forum/portal type sites, Home page links to pages within the site that have text supporting the key words is a good thing.
  • There's a whole school of thought about how pages within a site could/should link to each other to improve page rank. YMMV
• You are linked to by similar sites.

The most important thing you can do for SEO is to pick your keywords. "Travel" or "Hotel" are not good keywords. To much competition. "Southern Sardinia Lodging" may get you positioned better for relevant searches.

Understand how SE's use plural/singular. Goolge will "add the S" for keywords, but not delete it. I have a site with the keywords "....Teams" shows up in 2nda nd 3rd slots on first page for that search. Same search ending with "....Team" shows my site on page 4.

Run your keywords past the SE's. See who's on the first page. Run their pages through Lynx and figure out why they're their and you'll get clues to structuring your own content. - Note that "age of page" counts as well. Ask the high ranked sites to link to you.

Never buy SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The net is full of useful information. Start wth the news group news:alt.internet.search-engines and work out from there.

BTW. BoLt's site is a good example of the importance of content. No key words, but lot's of useful content and simple navigation. My google toolbar shows it as having a page rank of 4 which is quite good. Google has tools for webmasters so you can show sites that link-back to you, page rank, etc.