Can someone with some experience take a peak?

[SeanT]

Hey,

I've created a political debate site called volconvo, and would just like some suggestions. Does anything troublesome stick out right away? I've done a little research, and I realize I have to get some sites to link to me (I'm working on it), but what else should I do?

I'm not afraid to spend a little money if it helps too.

Thanks guys..

[greg]

political sites seem to be a little different in seo than the normal sites, just due to the lack of good political sites out there in which to link from. do the normal submitting to directories and stuff. here is a political one that i have a link from: http://www.politicalusa.com/ if you want to sign up there

[I, Brian]

Hi SeanT, and welcome to the forums.

As for your question - in all honesty, I'd look to upgrade from IPB to phpbb or vBulletin, if you can, as spiders generally not like IPB much, but love the other two.

[SeanT]

heh..Brian, it would be absolutely impossible to do that at this point. My entire site is dependent on the coding.

I'll have to figure out how to improve it's chances by fixing the long links and such.

[Cibok]

<Admin Edit - No Self Promotion Please>

[I, Brian]

SeanT - well...IPB's can get indexed, but I've only ever seen this done in part, and don't know what work arounds may be available. It just means it'll be harder to net lots of small traffic terms if the indexing isn't great.

But it is a nice looking site. I'd say presentation is going to be your stronger point here. If people like that then it'll be easier to get the backlinks that will make all the difference.

Hope I didn;t worry you too much, but you did ask about weaknesses. Concentrate on your strengths and you should do fine, though.

[SeanT]

Thanks Brian,

I appeciate the honesty. I'm actually working on a script that will make those long urls very short and readible, so google will find them more 'friendly'.

And yes, I'm going to try to get as many backlinks as possible.

[SeanT]

I know some of the staff members here replied to my topic.

Any chance your services you offer would help me, or can you let me know of any options that might help a political forum like mine? I'm willing to put in the work it takes to get linked, etc, but I also have a job and school...so I might need some momentum through $$ if you know what I mean.

let me know...

[ATLien]

I think your best bet would be directories. Submit to lots of directories. Also if you have a high unique hits level, you can probly get some good backlinks just by asking other site. Another suggestion I would make is alt tags. In you logo, I would put a very keyword heavy discription of the site, then search engines will pick that up as your discription, and maybe rank you better.

[I, Brian]

Sean, if you pay me to do link building it would cost you quite a bit - because link building is a very laborious, time consuming, and expensive thing to do. I'd need to cover costs and profit. For commerical sites this is nothing more than an investment to be made, but for non-commercial sites there's often no cashflow to fund such an investment.

Because yours is a non-commercial site I'd therefore recommend your taking the time to get links yourself - directory submissions and link exchanges as well.

I have some good resources coming on this - hang around and I'll show them all after the next PR update.

[offtopic]
Btw - I've suddenly got quite a few referrers to the world religions site (in my sig link) from the sports site you are "chicken..." on, but I can't find the thread - any pointers? I'm intrigued.
[/offtopic]

[SeanT]

Brian, are you talking to me with the offtopic stuff? I don't understand what you mean.

[I, Brian]

Sean, forums.leagueunlimited.com has become a major referrer to www.comparative-religion.com - and there's someone called Chicken Hunter there advertising your forum:
http://forums.leagueunlimited.com/viewtopic.php?t=13700

I wondered if somehow you may know something about any of this.

[SeanT]

oh yea, he's a good friend I know from Australia..one of my best friends actually

Small world eh?