I'd noticed that this site hasn't been showing up too well in recent search results. Fewer people were finding this site in search results, the number of indexed pages was actually declining, and the searchbots were hardly ever crawling the forums any more. Every page that was indexed had the same description ("The Bibby Team offers a fun and friendly forum experience."). That's not very informative for people searching for content posted on this site, and it led to duplicate meta descriptions, which can be bad for SEO.

For that reason, I deleted the meta description line from the default wrapper file (the one read by searchbots). I also made the shoutbox visible only to registered accounts; in the past, shoutbox posts have sometimes appeared in search results for topics, which shouldn't happen. These two adjustments should make it easier for people to find this forum on Google, Bing, and other search engines, and it could even increase the number of visitors! You never know.

Also, for those who care, I fixed a little bug in the default wrapper so that the default skin is compliant with the W3 Validator. (You probably don't.)

Sounds fun. I on a few occasions have seen that thing where shoutbox comments appeared in search results where the results were supposed to be topics.

I arguably care about the W3C standards compliance thing. By this I mean I (probably) wouldn't have held you at hand point over something being wrong had I known it, but I think it's cool that is now a thing that is no longer wrong.

What you really should be doing is getting linkbacks on websites with high Page Rank (PR). The more you do that, the more valuable your website is for engines like Google (I think Yahoo and others work a bit differently). Just make sure they 'do follow' (if they have 'nofollow' then engines indexing them won't go on to index your link).

Also, I'd recommend that when you advertise on other sites (like forums with a link in your sig) you just use a text link, but the text be something you'd expect people to search for to find your site. An example might be Game Development Forum. The more you do that, the more valuable the website will be for those search search terms.

Also maybe do some reading into SEO because there's heaps of stuff I don't even know about it. These are just things I've picked up along the way.

Thanks for the tips. The promotion I've done for this forum has been limited to signature/profile links on other forums I visit, and a few times each year I'll post a comment on a blog post I found interesting or helpful, and I'll list this as my Web site. Every once in a while I'll tweet a link to one of my development topics or a thought-provoking conversation. It would probably be wise to promote this forum more actively, especially as activity has increased in recent weeks.

SEO is a big topic these days - there's lots of jobs for those who know how to optimize Internet pages for search engines. Unfortunately, much of the information on the Internet is kind of spammy - a lot of these SEO gurus are trying more to convince you to hire their service than actually help you. It can take a good amount of effort to separate the useful advice from the spam.

there are some webmastering blogs and forums around that are willing to share knowledge. Don't bother with people trying to sell it.

That's true. The problem is the sellers tend to outnumber the sharers, so it can take some digging to find high-quality, impartial information.

Also, while Google Webmaster Tools takes several days to register changes, search traffic shot up dramatically on the day I made these changes, so they must've worked.