Ideas to help grow Backcountrypost

[Nick]

I think it's safe to assume that one of the most important ingredients to a good forum is a good base of contributing members. I think we're off to an incredible start in that department but I don't want to just sit around and hope that continues. So if anyone has any ideas to help grow the forum, post them here. I'm already planning on printing up a bunch of free stickers, cards and shirts once we work out a permanent logo.

 

[Deadeye008]

Hats(or beenies) would be cool! I'd even pay for them as long as they look good.

 

[kris247]

Work some SEO mojo to get the forum higher in Google search results. I have some people at my office that are SEO pros, so I'll ask for some tips.

 

[Nick]

Work some SEO mojo to get the forum higher in Google search results. I have some people at my office that are SEO pros, so I'll ask for some tips.

Great idea! I worked on a bit of that last night. Got the site map built and fixed up the robots.txt. The main blog site gets ranked pretty high in most related google results so I'm hoping that will help the forum. I just checked and the forum is finally showing up in results which wasn't the case yesterday. A lot of it will be about link building to and from external websites to establish our relevance. Let me know if your SEO guys have any tips!

 

[Nick]

I think another big thing is if everyone would help in posting content. Obviously trip reports are awesome but other things that you all can share will go a long way in getting like-minded users on board. Start up a thread on your favorite tent, outdoors news, whatever. The more different people adding content, the better.

 

[Seldom Seen Anderson]

What about tags? Not sure exactly how they work but it seems that other online forums you leave a tag after post. I assume they help search engines find things. For example someone found a TR that I posted on bogley.com about some local petroglyphs. He wanted to talk to me about them so he joined bogley just so he could email me. I would assume he found my original TR because I had left the tag yellowman pictograph or something like that...

 

[Nick]

What about tags? Not sure exactly how they work but it seems that other online forums you leave a tag after post. I assume they help search engines find things. For example someone found a TR that I posted on bogley.com about some local petroglyphs. He wanted to talk to me about them so he joined bogley just so he could email me. I would assume he found my original TR because I had left the tag yellowman pictograph or something like that...

Great idea. The tags do wonders for the blog side of backcountrypost. A lot of times a search will bring up the tag page before the trip report! I'm on it!