Hello All -

New to the forum and hoping you can help me with a "problem" client. My husband had someone approach him to design a site and forum for industrial scales - this person is selling them. My husband tried to tell him that he really needs to get the site up first and then the forum as the site content will help with search engines.

The client wanted the forum to get done first and then see what kind of results he would get first. We tried to tell him we can put in keywords - however an empty forum will not get good rankings in a search result. We also stressed that we are not marketing - only design. He was fine with that - his forum is done and posted and now he is refusing to pay us because he is not getting the results he wants with the search engines.

Here is his forum: http://www.scaleforums.com/

My husband told him to try and get his friends to populate the site with posts - he didn't and the keywords he sent us are just the brand name of the scales.

Is there anyway to get him to show up on engines so we can get paid?

Thanks in advance,
Kecia

The trouble with forums is the content is created entirely by people.. So unless they write great posts and use descriptive titles there is little you can do in the way of SEO.

The advice you gave him about creating the site first was the best advice you could have given. If you create and SEO the site the forum will be able to get traffic from the main site. But there is no way of getting an empty forum to show up in search engines.

Clients tend to ask for, and expect, the impossible. My advice would be to explain just how impossible it is to seo and empty forum and get it to rank well.

This is ***-backward cranial-rectal syndrome corporate thinking at its very finest.

Tell your client, and make it abundantly clear, that he or she is completely clueless when it comes to marketing ANYTHING, never mind a website.

Stand back and look at this for a second and pretend you're the client.

You've got a product. You're trying to sell a product. So not only are you not going to build a site to sell the product, you're going to build a forum site, which is used for general discussion purposes and/or support in odd cases but never for sales, to try and gain search engine ranking to sell a product on a non-marketing site.

In other words, the idea is simply ludicrous and should be abandoned. It's not really your fault in this case, because you just did what you were told. However, in the future you should seriously look at what someone's proposing. If it's stupid (as this is), walk away from it.

Hello stOx and ADAM -

Thank you both for your excellent replies!

ADAM - I totally agree with you about client attitudes! On a good note - we have host access - No Pay - No Forum (even a crappy one)!

Thanks
Kecia

Ever consider just populating the forum with your own posts that are keyword rich? Have a few conversations about the products with your husband, and it should help with something (maybe MSN will like you? lol). In any event, other then paying people to talk about this topic (I doubt they would do a good job), I don't know how else you would do it.

I would make a quick list of topics and write posts for them. Get your client involved too in the posting. The other suggestion would be to announce the forum at other related sites and forums to get the word out. Really, once you get a few people to sign up and actually participate, it should take care of itself.

On a side note, it is too bad that some clients (I have some of them too... sigh) don't understand that just building a website doesn't make people come to it. You could try to tell your client that just putting a website online is like building a business in the middle of a field with no roads to it - no one will come. Perhaps if you explained to them what needed to be done, described in terms they can understand, you might get better results. On the other hand, some people are too "dense" to understand anyways. So good luck!

I agree with Adam.
The forum should be dropped totally. The client is NOT interested in the forum from an angle where it will become a useful asset to the company website.
It will simply become a dumping ground for spammers and link droppers.

You absolutely need to make sure that your forum does not turn into a spamming ground. If done correctly it can certainly be a useful avenue and an avenue for SEO, but it's not going to happen on its own. You either need to get your own team of posters or pay for it. If you are going the paying route then make sure that you go for a company that prides itself in quality and makes sure that your posts are pertinent to the subject matter. We have done this for many clients very successfully, but it needs to be taken seriously and not thought of as something that happens overnight.