I'm seriously considering putting together a technical site on specific technologies featuring content, blogs, & a vBulletin forum open to community discussion. What are techniques for getting included in Google searches for related terms?

Obviously, if no one knows about my site, no one will find it...

Any insight shared will be greatly appreciated.

Since no one else has a comment yet, I'll add mine.

If I were to develop a brand new web site today, the following three items would be my priority (at development stage):

1. Ensure that the markup (and response headers) of every page is valid and appropriate.
2. Ensure that the navigation (links) to the rest of the site is complete.
3. Getting at least one of my pages (usually the homepage) listed on as many related sites as possible. Of course this is the hardest thing to do! Alternatively, you could create unique content or generate a unique "tool" that will attract a lot of interest, which should do very nicely for this purpose too.

Having said that, I believe it is going to be tough to attract any kind of traffic off the search engines in the beginning. It is not impossible, just tough, and it only gets tougher every year.

When I started this site (GIDForums) there were many (MANY) quiet days in the beginning. Fortunately for me, I didn't care a lot about traffic to the site (or even where it was coming from). I was just excited that I had a site (or 2) and I got to "meet" the occasional new and interesting person who took the trouble to register on my site!

Looking at your idea again, I wonder how you plan to handle the users' registration process if you develop a site with contents, blogs and a vbulletin forum.

Your point is that appearing in the search results is dependent upon the crawlers finding links to your site elsewhere.

I can only assume that Google's crawlers are collectively maintaining counts of how many times they come across links, & frequency directly affects the corresponding ranking in corresponding search results.

So this begs a related question. How frequently are sites crawled/scraped? Is there a way to determine whether and/or when Google's crawlers have visited a site?

No, it is not required that your web site is linked from elsewhere for Google to crawl your web site, at least I don't think so. You could, for example, submit your web site through Google Webmaster Central (look for the "Submit your content to Google" section on the page).

I think Google will fetch your pages at least once per day. It is logical to assume they will crawl your web site more frequently as you add more content to the web site.

When I want to find out what Googlebot (Google's crawler) has been doing on my site, I look at the Apache (web server) access log files, searching for "googlebot" in the user agent string. Warning: there are quite a number of rogue bots impersonating Googlebot too.