So the truth comes out now, huh Jimmy!
Little did you know I was working on building a mini empire all this time.
First of all this is not a Google forum and using their tools has little to do with how you rank. I used GoDaddy and this forum was installed on my server by me. I bought it from
www.vBulletin.com and installed it on my host. It's written in PHP but I didn't have to know any of that to get the forum running. I just simply edited the configuration.php file per the instructions and ftp'd the files up and Voila! - The forum is born.
Since you are a developer you will have no problems customizing the forum to your own design. I just decided to keep the forum "as is" because I am not into programming. So it's completely possible for you to install the forum on your host and then update the header/footer files to match your site's design. Many people do this.
Jimmy, it's great that you have the programming skills because you can do pretty much anything you want on your site. Now you just need to learn the marketing side. I always send people to
www.selfpromotion.com It has a great overview for getting ranked in the major search engines.
You mentioned to me in an email about the new version of Flash having the capability to add meta tags. That's great but meta tags are becoming less and less relevant as time goes on. They are important because they are used to display your description in the engines but in terms of getting you ranked they aren't very useful anymore.
Now it's all about quality links pointing back to you. You need to get hundreds of other developer sites to link to you using the keywords you target. That's the challenging part these days because how well you rank determines
Back in the day when I first started in 1998, I could load up my pages with meta tags, and repeat the keywords I wanted to target and in a couple of days I had a #1 rank in the popular engines (this was even before Google was around. I think InfoSeek and Excite were the hot engines then. Anyone remember them?)
But now it's a whole new ballgame! You need to really learn how to write and communicate and make your site appealing so people will want to bookmark it and return. You need tons of pages and your concept should be different than your competitors. So many people now are copying other people's content and trying to duplicate their ideas but they never get found because they don't have the backlinks (these are relevant links pointing to your site) so as far as Google is concerned your site is not popular enough... therefore you will have a hard time getting a decent rank.
So once you combine your programming skills with marketing. You will be good to go! You're half way there!
