Search engines finding my topic, postings

So if I place a link directly to the forum on my home page to my forum then the bots will find the topics?

Thanks

Bill

Yup. You could place the link to it from some other page, but an internal link from the home page is usually considered to be more important.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is kind of a black art. The engines keep mum about how they work and rank pages and the algorithm's they use tend to change frequently. They all however, need a link they can follow.

A lot of people pay for SEO but don't usually wind up any better off than a amateur who does a little research. Couple of rules of thumb that I use with sites:

1. Search bots will do "surface" crawls relatively often. This is a scan of the home page and perhaps some of the more important  other pages for content change. With less frequent (6 weeks to 6 months), they do a "deep" crawl.
2. Every 6-12 weeks, a search engine "dances" - it plays with changes in it's ranking algorithms. Hope fully, your site will be deep crawled just before this event.
1. The ranking position you see is not always seen by others. Google - for instance - has 10 or 12 different data bases. Which one you hit normally will depend upon your physical location on the internets infrastructure, and what DB they want to route you to based upon their load. when they change their algorithm's, they roll it out on one DB for tweaking, then roll it out to the others 1 or 2 at a time.
3. Sites with frequent content changes get crawled more often.
4. Sites that have been around for a long time are ranked higher.
5. Sites that are linked to by highly ranked pages in their category are ranked higher.
6. Sites that are linked to by a lot of pages in their category are ranked higher.
1. Sites linked to by a lot of pages that are not in their category are ranked lower.
7. Sites that are linked to by a few highly ranked pages and a few low ranked pages in their category tend to have their rank affected by the Average rank of the other pages.
8. Content is King. Search engines are highly motivated to present results that are of value to their users. They like to see certain words used fairly close to other words in a sub-sub-sub... category. If highly ranked sites that link to you have the same term, it's assumed your content is relevant. If you do nothing else, have content that someone wants yo read.
9. Page rank is pyramidal. A lot fewer sites in each rank as the index goes higher. Some categories do not have a page rank of 9 or 10. Some only have 1 or 2 sites in their pr index. Your best guide to whether your page rank is good or bad is how are you ranked relative to other sites that are great in your category.
10. Your weblogs are your friend. Look at them to determine the frequency and depths of crawls. You'll find that the historical info will drive the release date of future content changes. Good log stat's programs will break down the hits for each search word and for each search term by search bot. Figure out if those are the categories/search terms you want to be found by.

In your situation, I wouldn't mess to much with success. Looks like you've been around for a while and a skim of your back links in Google seems to indicate that you are well linked to. You have a very good page rank. Giving the bots access to your forum will certainly increase the relevant content index and is probably the best thing you could do at this time.

If you want to go after other search phrase, think in terms of adding more rather than changing/deleting what you have. If you're selling chickens, the words rooster, chicks, and breeding may help you get higher in search phrases for poultry breeding.  Toss in the word ducks in your high ranked pages and even if you sell them, it may lower your rank in chicken sales and poultry breeding. You'll want to separate your ducks from your chickens on your site.

Good source for info is the news group news:alt.internet.search-engines - you'll find links to many sites that have more insight than I do.