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As it is, my site is just phpBB3 forums (www.bearsfansonline.com); would a sitemap really help that much?

I don't have a robots.txt file in my root. Do I just create a text file, put the above lines into it, and upload it to my root after changing the name?

Pretty much as the question says, is there any way to stop search engines from crawling a directory? I am working on a Wordpress installation for my site but don't want it to be listed in search engines until it's ready to be shown to the world. I know the simplest way is to password-protect the directory but I had some issues when I tried to implement that so I'd like to see if there's a way to do it without passwords. Thanks in advance.

If you mean do we have reporters contacting players/coaches/etc, no. However, when you search 'chicago bears news' only the first 4 are legitimate sources of information (newspapers and official Bears website). Everything that follows is just sites which aggregate all the newest articles by the top 4 sites. Since we report the newest developments as well via our forums, twitter account, and tumblr page, I don't see anything dishonest about saying that we are a source of information for Bears fans.

Hmm. I  think I may have misunderstood the results. What exactly does "search volume" mean?

I run a Chicago Bears forum and my long-term goal to make it the most popular Bears forum on the internet (I know, huge goal). Because of that, I've been focusing on optimizing it for the keywords 'chicago bears forum'. However, being new to SEO, I only checked now and saw the search volume for those keywords is barely 2,000.

My question is, and this is probably an an obvious one, should I be switching my focus to more popular keywords such as 'chicago bears news' if I want to increase traffic to my forum?

I'm in the same boat as you although my forum is more of a niche. One idea that's been recommended to me is creating a contest of some sort for a prize, with the stipulation that you need to make X posts to enter. Granted, you'll mostly have people posting to meet the threshold but it will at least get them into your forum and you might have some people who decide to stay.

Another tip is, if you have access to OSE here, add your competitors and see who's linking to them. I've found some directories that I didn't know about that my competitors were getting traffic from and made sure to add my site to them as well.

And of course, as I'm sure you'll hear a million times, try to make sure you have good content. When your website comes up in a search engine you want to make sure people click on it.

Another tip not so much in regards to attracting people but keeping them, is to keep the number of subforums you have minimal. If you're just starting off the worst thing you can do is have 15+ subforums; your users will never interact. Better to make those as the need arises.

Finally, a really good resource is The Admin Zone, a forum about, well, forums. There's a lot of information there that can help generate traffic. Here's the URL: http://www.theadminzone.com/

Good luck!

From my limited reading, if you're using javascript, it's best not to base your entire menu system on it. While Google will crawl javascript, it does so in a limited fashion. As for the other items you mentioned, I'm really not experienced enough to offer advice on those.

What I got from the article was that he said it's not something that you should worry too much about , but it's not something you should overlook either. He seemed to hint that since SEO is continuously evolving, it's best to be proactive when trying to better your visitors' experience. That's my take on it at least.

So, Naghirniac, I'm sure any benefit you would have gotten from increasing your page speed, you have already realized. It's probably better to focus your energy on opportunities with greater returns.

Good point, Marcin. I'm not using those mods as it seems Google indexes my pages fine. Thanks for the advice.