Indeed, I understand your point. However, we are tracking every click and link coming from somewhere else. When we add a new post or review, we watch to see what happens with that post or thread.

The experiment strictly revolves around search engine sourcing and word-of-mouth. As far as VBSEO goes, on another site I own, we've already shown that VBSEO improved the hit rate from people searching on Google. However, those people usually got what they were looking for and either bookmarked it or copy-n-pasted it somewhere else. It did not improve registration rate. (This site has about 90,000 posts, 130 active users and close to 2,000,000 hits per month)

We're not after truly scientific results, it's just one experiment using all of our combined forum experience to see where things go with barebones marketing & content production. We want the people that make it to our site to have come from a reference (friend/shared link) or simply a search engine. Right now, if you Google two specific words, our site pops up first on the list about 80% of the time. So, we shall see how it goes... :)

I understand what you're saying EtherNet but an experiment is useless if you cannot measure the effect of a single variable. You are effectively trying to measure one variable (search marketing) when in fact you're measuring several. I would take your results with a pinch of salt ;)

I opened my site 2 months ago, but so far the method that I saw that gained users was advertising on www.omegle.com (lol).

I'm currently trying to affiliate with other forums, if you're interested PM me ;)

interesting thread i'll post my finding later on

I always found that annoying people until they gave in worked to a certain extent...

I'de say having a proper design, attractive enough and fast loading...New visitors will leave as quickly as they came if your site takes too long too load.

BINGO!

If your not dedicated to YOUR forum and your mind is elsewhere then it simply won't work, you have to be in control of your forum and (this word will sound bad but used to for good lol) EXPLOIT your niche to the point of exhaustion but do not overwhelm your members :D The one thing is to always improve your forum while providing content your members simply can't get anywhere else OR better content but always remember the masses do not like change that much.

S-MAN

Moved from IPB to vB lol seriously the best move i ever made regarding my forums. ;)

See really there is no mod in this world will make guests look at to your forum
But you can try these stuff : -

1. Get your Forum Unique, even if not better but make it unique
2. be proper in general, and make your forum to the point , don't include off-topic sections or forums
3. get unique content , be the first to get the content
4. Do not try to copy other forums or give them new features just because your competitors have them installed
5. Create a New Design for your forum.
6. get seo content , vbseo and sitemap will help you in that

any forum software can be good lol
even the most big forums are of phpbb , so software does not matter

the thing which matters is how you manage it !!!

Same :)