Quote Originally Posted by welshy
Thanks for your reply. My forum doesn't show up in a Google search. How do you go about adding a domain name to my forum please?

Many Thanks,

Jamie.
Open an account at someplace like godaddy.com and purchase a domain name for 9.99 or less per year. You then use their tools to "forward" that domain to your forum. A good example is one of mine, grandparentsforchange.com that I purchased from godaddy. It is forwarded to my forum at Bizhat. If I move my forum to another company, I just change the forwarding to the new company. You can forward your domain to any url.

As for showing up on a google search, that depends on several factors, what key words you are using and how long you have had your forum. searching for the url might not bring back a hit. Try searching for some key words that are in one of the posts.

If you want the url listed with google put it in several posts on your forum and post it on other forums, like this one, in your signature and profile and in posts. Thing is people who don't know about your forum do not know the url to search for it by name. You need to put key words in your posts that you think people will be searching for.

I wanted google to catalog my pages and bring back hits for individual names, so, I posted those names as often as I could in every post I could. Now those names show up in google searches on the first page with links to my forum.

Google ranks your site using three criteria, number of hits, number of other sites that link to your site, and recently by how much you pay google for advertising. You can increase the number of sites that link to yours by joining forums like this and post your url in you signature, your profile and in posts. Blogs and guestbooks are just as good. You can have your friends and forum members help you with this and do even better.

I suggest that you do some research on how the internet and various aspects of it work, that will help you to have a better and more productive site. There is more to it than just putting up a site and welcoming people to it, there are billions of web pages on the internet.