Getting new members...

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Digger

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Just wondering what we are doing to get new members who are interested in vegetarianism vs. simply being a retirement community for old VB members? Is there a way to increase our presence on google searches that we may all be able to help with? Our community is thriving right now, and Karl is doing a great job, I just don't want to see this forum die in two months due to atrophy.
 
Yes. I would like to do what I can. However, I maintain a very low FB profile - I use it to keep in touch with just a few friends and a couple of parrot groups. I have added the VV address to my signature on the only other board on which I'm active, but there are only a handfull of veg*ns on that board.

I'd be happy to do anything that would help increase our profile on Google searches.
 
People are working on Facebooking. In my experience the vast majority of new members we will get will come from Google searches on common topics, so we have to work on getting ourselves at least on the first page of searches for things like vegetarian forums, vegan forums, vegetarian message boards, etc.
 
People are working on Facebooking. In my experience the vast majority of new members we will get will come from Google searches on common topics, so we have to work on getting ourselves at least on the first page of searches for things like vegetarian forums, vegan forums, vegetarian message boards, etc.

What do we do to make that more likely to happen?
 
In my experience the vast majority of new members we will get will come from Google searches on common topics, so we have to work on getting ourselves at least on the first page of searches for things like vegetarian forums, vegan forums, vegetarian message boards, etc.
Is there a way that we can help facilitate this?
 
Well the site owner has to make a list of keywords, and incorporate them into the forum. Once we know what keywords are chosen, it is possible to write short blurbs on other pages like Facebook, Google+, etc. with those keywords, and a link to VeggieViews. The more pages outside our forum we can get links on the better. So being mentioned regularly on social networking pages and blogs will definitely help.
 
Well we could always do a stunt like offering a million dollars to anyone who can identify the fake vegetarians at VB. :D

But seriously, we need to find a way to be listed high on the Google search results, as that will net us the biggest gains over any other method.
 
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Yes, but what can we as members do to get ourselves listed higher on google?
 
Keywords and inbound links from high ranking sites are the top two things that get you listed high on Google. I know someone (don't remember who or which thread) mentioned doing the invisible list of keywords on the home page. Do not do this. It will get you penalized and possibly banned from Google and possibly other search engines.

If there was some type of content that other sites found useful and would want to link to, that would probably be the most helpful. Exchanging links doesn't count either, they have to be incoming only.
 
Keywords and inbound links from high ranking sites are the top two things that get you listed high on Google. I know someone (don't remember who or which thread) mentioned doing the invisible list of keywords on the home page. Do not do this. It will get you penalized and possibly banned from Google and possibly other search engines.

Yea, I made the invisible keyword suggestion. Had no idea it was illegal.

By "inbound" do you mean a link from FB to VV or from VV to FB?
 
Yea, I made the invisible keyword suggestion. Had no idea it was illegal.

By "inbound" do you mean a link from FB to VV or from VV to FB?

The invisible keyword thing (It's called keyword stuffing) is an old SEO trick. Here's what Google says about it: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66353
and other types of keyword stuffing they don't allow: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66358

By inbound, I mean where other sites have links to VV, so FB to VV.
In the past, there were forums setup for people to exchange links to their sites (each person put a link on their site to the other sites), but Google doesn't count those. They have to be inbound only.

VV links to a FB page and the same FB page links to VV - link doesn't count.
There's a recipe on VV that someone on FB links to and VV doesn't link back to that person - link counts.
 
Most of my FB friends are from VB. So that doesn't really help. ha
 
Most of my friends on FB are not interested in anything even remotely vegetarian/vegan. :(
 
There are a lot of veg*n groups on FB as well as pages for veg*n products. Maybe posting on them, mentioning that there is a new board if people have questions or just want to meet other veg*ns would peak their interest enough to check it out.
 
Anyone on here who has a Facebook, Google+, blog, Twitter, etc. can write a small blurb with our link in it or some of our keywords, should IS let us know what they are, on a recurring basis. This will help our placement with Google. You needn't try to interest your friends or spam your contacts. Just having a link back to us on one or more of your pages will help us.
 
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