Martha-
As always, we appreciate your support of our little website.
I believe what Ginger was referring to was the wealth of information available on other, more mature sites. This is something that grows organically with time. The search engines slurp up the content off all your posts and indexes them. If someone does a search for the information and the search engine determines that we are a good choice, they will display us as a link. In this way, people who didn't know we exist are able to find us and hopefully find useful information.
Simply put, the more users there are, the more content that is created, and therefore, the more likely random people will find us. Even random off-topic posts, or posts with spelling errors eventually helps to build traffic. So, just keep doing what you are doing, Google's watching you.
Another way to help, is like eddie mentioned... word of mouth. Chances are good that you found out about us through someone else. Spread the word.
And, for the record, forum operators can benefit from all the traffic that is generated - whether it be by selling paid advertisements, getting name recognition, or even the ability to book a vacation rental or tour for you. Currently, we make enough money with advertising to keep the servers up and running (although recently, not very well.
). For the moment, this is "fun" for us and not a business.
I have bigger plans for the website, but those plans will only come to fruition when I have a chance to work on them, usually after the day's work is done or on weekends. Want to do my real work so I can play all day?
Hope that was un-techie enough for you. I'm a geek and sometimes have a hard time expressing myself.
