SEO / Marketing Question
 

Let's say I'm going to be creating a big network to talk about widgets. I am going to have my main website that is my big daddy. I want to create a msg board for all my widget traffic.

Should I put the msg board on the big daddy website to add more pages to the domain etc etc.

OR

Should I create a website called widgetboard.com and then have a text link to that forum across my network.

Your thoughts?

after panda add add the board to your money site. it will add traffic, views, fresh content etc.

Not to mention time spent on site

Not to mention, waffles.... and keywords... all relevant to bog daddy.

Running a forum is a major pain in the ass.

i dont get it srsly.,

if u wanna rank then u must have

og content
onsite seo
lots of pages like millions will work.
and backlinks will grow automatically.

You definitely want the forum on your main site. Forums are the shit. and running a forum isn't really that bad. Well, the one I run only has a few thousand members. I imagine something like GFY would be difficult to manage.

Forum as part of the main site. If the main site is going to rank well, it helps to have tons of content on the same site.
WG

That's what I was thinking but I wanted some other answers. Thanks guys!

www.mainsite.com
fourum.mainsite.com

add content and watch it grow.

add it to your main domain and link to it from your index page using "widgets forum" and then get backlinks to your index page that use the term "widgets forum".

Boom :)

~Ray

What's the best forum software out there? I don't need the best, I need something that doesn't have to be updated all the damn time and something I can have designed.

vBulletin

I never update it and it runs perfect. A table crashed once but I just had to click the repair button..

And it looks the sexiest :)

Now a day Google says it's better to be on the domain. I would add a couple other marketing domains but you can just have blogs or something like that on it.

Fuck now I need a vBulletin designer lol

I've used PHPBB before and customizing the look isn't too difficult, don't think you need a designer...

The reason you don't get it is that you are looking for a short cut.

Too many people try to build sites for search engines and not people.

PEOPLE want original content,
PEOPLE want a clean easily navigable site where they can understand what the site is about and find what they want at a glance.
PEOPLE want to believe a site has authority and the best way to prove authority is having other people link to your content
PEOPLE need to be able to find the information they are looking for, a relevant site to their search is better for them than an ad farm

It just so happens that Google is engineered to take into account what people want and their search platform is tailored to that as closely as possible.

If you create a good site for people it will probably also make Google happy.

Forum on your main site. And lots of related video. Videos works great at reducing your bounce rate.

Build satellite sites that deep link into your main site. Build traffic to the satellite sites.
Then your main site will become an authority site and thats when things start to get interesting.