To those of you out there with successful sites, inquiring minds want to know. Was there any one thing that spiked your growth? Was it being slashdotted? Being blogged? Or was it a combination of things that happened over a short period of time. Or just steady growth over time?

Its been steady growth on one, and the other one which is the forum about my country's cricket team our coach joined my site and started posting that boosted up the registerations to 50 per day for atleast 2 to 3 days.

It also has been a pretty steady growth over time for my site, some high points due to linking back to my site through my released hacks but site itself hasnt gained itself much members for just existing

I saw a huge spike (doubled traffic and sales) in two months after intensive on page SEO. Since then I've seen a 40% increase in traffic in 4 months mainly due to link building programs.

I think it was link exchange/affiliates and good search engine submissions that boosted my traffic. Then visitors become returning ones if they like it.

mnemtsas, on page SEO is what I'm lacking, I think. I still have to investigate exactly how to go about it. I know a lot of the techniques, it's just a matter of trying to incorporate them into a forum where the majority of the content is written by members.

I'd look initially at trying <title> tags for each forum. So the <title> for this thread is 'What Spiked Your Growth'. Perhaps this should be 'Internet Marketing Forum - What Spiked Your Growth'. You'll need to truncate it at 65 characters.

Also the big 'What Spiked Your Growth' could be exactly the same 'Internet Marketing Forum - What Spiked Your Growth' and in a <h1> tag.

I'd look at getting different themed <title> and <h1> tags on each page happening first. Shouldn't be too hard for a php whiz like yourself.

The next thing I'd try after that is moving all the themed stuff to the top of the parsed HTML code. It looks like vB uses DIV's for everything so this shouldnt be too hard. Just a thought, is there an SEO hack for vB already available? I've implemented one on the phpBB2 board on my site.

Thanks for the comments mnemtsas. As for the title tags, I set it up just as the page title on purpose After all, why would I want the words "Internet Marketing forum" to be repeated on thousands of pages ... this way, what each individual thread is about gets a higher ranking and there is no oversaturation of keywords that aren't page specific.

Also, notice how right below the navigation it says the thread title and below that the forum name in small letters? That is actually CSS'ed H1 and H2 tags The same is done with forum titles and forum descriptions on the thread listing pages I'm one step ahead of ya ... and still apparently I have an on-page SEO problem

Also, the only SEO hack for vBulletin that I know of is the mod_rewrite one that turns all of the showthread.php? and forumdisplay.php? pages into static html URLs. And guess what? Not only is it implemented here, but I wrote it myself ... you can read all about it in our Web Hosting Tutorials forum

However, enough about me and DaniWeb. No self-promotion allowed in this forum, remember Besides, I still wanna hear all about how everyone else did it!

I'm not sure that oversaturation would be a real problem. After all each title will be different, the first word or two would be the same, but everything after that would be different.

Having different titles is exactly what you want, but what use is 'What Spiked Your Growth' from a SERPS pov? Maybe try it on one forum only and see what happens..........Of course I'd send an email to SEO Guy first and get his opinion!

By the way I knew about the mod rewrite thing :cheesy:

I've had steady grow with occasional spikes when something noteworthy was happening, like when the MSN Messenger 6 beta leaked last year, or an AIM outage. I've never done much search engine optimization, but I get spidered regularly get a large percentage of traffic from search engines.

Time + regularly updated content seems to be the key factor in growth.