Is Gooruze SE Optmized?

I think it's probably too soon to get any traction for a phrase like "online marketing community". Give it time, and yes, if that's the primary term, then optimize the home page and internal linking accordingly.
As far as long tail traffic is concerned, we really should move "Gooruze" from the front of the Article Page Titles to the end. The article title should be like this:

How to Manage Your Reputation in 10 Steps - Andy Beal - Gooruze

(I would include the author's name so as to possibly get traffic when people search for various personalities.)

good stuff matt

Thanks Matt - Great Advice - I'll add that idea to the wishlist.

Check out the ActiveRain network specific for Real Estate...many of their posts and articles rank high on searches...Gooruze is on it's way...it'll just take some time, but with good relevent content it will get there!

would love to hear the opinions of other Gooruze members on this topic...

Warren is bang on here. We are chasing the long tail of searches (the large volume of infrequent specific searches) matched to our user generated content. As Gooruze members write advice, particularly relevant, in depth articles they are inadvertently creating search engine friendly content. You may have noticed that the article title as given by the author produces the actual page title that gets indexed. This means it is particularly important to consider your article title when publishing advice. A few examples of how this long tail strategy is already working:

• 'Mass Linking' - Rank 2nd
• 'Your google reputation' - Rank 3rd

So the lesson here is help gooruze by writing good article and question titles. Perhaps we should rename this question as "Online Marketing Community - How is Gooruze ranking"? :-)

Marc - great examples.

the following actions by members will certainly help the articles rank well...

1. write a good heading
2. good content in the article
3. tag article with relevant tags
4. link to other relevant articles and external websites.

thanks so much for great answers, guys. i love this site and have learned a lot, so I'm certainly not trying to be critical.

Thanks Kathryn - sincerely we love your feedback - keep it coming

I take your point and thank you. Just goes to show - we thought we had all the right SEO architecture working - plenty of pages indexed etc.

However as you say when I do a search for online marketing community we don't show up in the top 10 - fortunately a great post by Andy Beal has us ranked 3rd but you are so right we should be in the top 10 results for "online marketing community". Interesting neither does sphinn show up. Which also highlights the failings of the search - if someone is looking for online marketing community I don't think they are currently getting a true reflection of what is available.

I wouldn't expect to get in the top 10 for "online marketing" or "internet marketing" but I do think we should be in the top 10 for "online marketing community", "online marketing social network"

I think we missed some of the easy SE tactics - like keyword rich content on the home page. Great example of how one can get so focussed on the message you forget the absolute basics. I think some tweaks are needed ASAP. Thanks again and feel free to keep the feedback coming.

Gooruze ranks pretty well for Google search "Online Marketing Community", about 30th... certainly could be better. Andy Beal's and Somewhatfrank's blog reviews of Gooruze rank very well for that term.

For Online Marketing Advice Community Gooruze ranks 4th.. now I know that is certainly a stretch for someone to type in :s

It certainly seems that we get traffic from the long tail and not from the major terms.

looks like some of the recently implemented SEO changes are working - we're up to 6th for "online marketing community".

oh - that's great
8th now for Online Marketing Community
down to around 25th for Online Marketing Advice Community

Hi Kathryn

You are in a great spot to learn about SEO, SEM and SMO.  Lots of great activity going on here and the collective knowledge of the community is amazing.  Best of luck.

The simple answer to "is Gooruze search engine optimized", is Yes.  This is due to the VibEngine (which powers Gooruze) being search engine friendly at the core architecture.  There are still a few tweaks that will be under taken to further improve this over time and of course, any advise or suggestions from any of the Gooruze community is more than welcome.  There is always more that a site could do to improve.

The nature of the community means that over time, Gooruze will be getting more of the long tail of the searches - users will continue to add more and more content that is in the very wide field of SEM, SEO and SMO - as well as increasing rank on some of the more mainstream keyphrases.  It is also a very competitive space for the keyphrases you have provided as an example as those are the keyphrases targeted by everyone doing SEM/SEO/SMO. 

Hope that helps - and looking forward to seeing other members suggestions for improving Gooruze's SEO - it is a community for everyone after all.

Edit: fix typing errors

Update:

Opps, seems that we did miss a few important pages in all the excitement of getting Gooruze out and then with the various updates that have gone live since. So we will be rectifying that as soon as possible - thanks for highlighting.

Here is what the home page should have / will soon have:

Title:  Gooruze: The Online Marketing Community with News, Articles, Q&A, Blogs, Groups and Advice.

Description: Gooruze is a niche web 2.0 community for online markers with ranked news, articles and advice. Network with other online marketers and find out the latest in digital marketing, search engine optimization and advertising, social media marketing, online advertising, blogging, affiliate marketing and more.

Keywords: online marketing, internet marketing online, online business marketing, ppc search engine internet marketing, search engine marketing, search marketing, yahoo search marketing, paid search, paid search advertising, internet marketing, marketing on the internet, internet marketing strategy, web internet marketing, internet marketing seo, marketing internet, internet marketing information, marketing articles, internet marketing articles, articles on marketing, internet marketing information articles, business marketing related articles, marketing news, advertising and marketing news, internet marketing news, internet marketing seo news, new marketing news, engine optimization search, search engine optimization, search engine optimisation, gooruze

As you can see we are focusing on a number of key terms around the space (at least for the homepage) and going for the long tail with over 10,000 pages indexed and counting. 

i believe a fair amount of the site is well optimized, however I do have a biased point of view.
I would love to hear what others think.

For example, if you look at this article page, I believe it is well optimized with...

1. relevant title and meta data
2. relevant text on the page
3. links to relevant content (ie: other relevant gooruze articles, and also links to relevant gooruze search results pages).

As I said before, would love to hear from others...