Time to change forum root page title for rankings?

**tryfuhl** · 07-06-2009, 04:10 AM

Well recently I started doing optimization of the forum and it's still very much in its infancy. My main focuses for the forum root were "off topic forum" and "general discussion forum."

Our main forum on the site is the "Off Topic Forum" and in order to not overly saturate I decided to optimize the forum root for "general discussion forum" also under the thought that with a bit of optimization we could likely rank decently for that, as it is not as popular of a term, yet still searched decently.

Well after Google's last crawl we've shot up from nowhere to 12th and 13th for "off topic forums" and "off topic forum" respectively. We rank in the mid 20s for "general discussion forums" and "general discussion forum." I think that Google is liking our density of Off Topic on the front page/in the description around the link to the forum, so being reactionary my first response would be "CHANGE THE DAMN PAGE TITLE TO OFF TOPIC FORUM" for the forum root. The yin to my yang is saying "BUT YOU HAVEN'T EVEN OPTIMIZED FOR GENERAL DISCUSSION FORUM" (I have it as the page title and once else on the page).

In this predicament would you go for the first page ASAP with off topic forum, or try to build up general discussion forum as well? I figure if I change the page title we'll definitely drop significantly for "general discussion forum" so I'm in a bit of a pickle of whether to go for the gold on one term or hold out for a couple of weeks and see where I land with both results.

I've mostly done SEO on more static and less user-generated sites, so I'm not used to seeing the fluctuations in SERPs as much (shot up 2 pages on each off topic keyword since yesterday and up one then down once again for the general discussion ones). Something tells me that we're going to creep onto the front page for off topic forum soon, but I'd rather have one result number 5 vs one result number 12 and one result number 20 or so. I think that that's the right way to go.

Any advice would be more than appreciated.

**Caddyman** · 07-06-2009, 04:45 AM

SEO is not a overnight thing, it takes time and patience. I fund that when i start a site and target a keyword google will pick it up and push its serps way high for a short while then it falls back down into it's proper place. might be what is happening with you here. optimize for all your terms and keep pluging away

**tryfuhl** · 07-06-2009, 08:16 AM

Yeah, it's just like dang, I know I could top 10 this in a short amount of time if I focus on it, at least for awhile. I think that I'll give it a week or two and see how things shift; but by then I will have already changed a few things due to having just really started the process.