Rev's SEO advice part 1

[The Reverend]

Hello everyone, today I will show you how to optimise your forum for SEO, seeing as SMF and PhpBB are my most commonly used forum software, I will use these in some of the sections of this article.

Okay, lets begin:

Here are some basic tips:

Create Content- arguably the most important thing to do when starting a forum is to keep creating fresh content, if you leave your forum go "stale" for to long, it will drop down in google's rankings.


Build Links- Okay, basically, building links is very important to get traffic, and it helps with your PR, the most effective way of building links is doing affiliate or link exchanges. Only do link exchanges with sites who's members will have an interest in what your site is about, otherwise it would be pointless.

Do post exchanges- Now, post exchanges can be very useful, if you put a link to your forum in your signature on the forum you are posting at, not only do you get backlinks, you also will (hopefully) get members and traffic as well.

Optimising your meta tags

You are definitely going to want to optimise your meta tags. If you dont know what these are, here is an example:

Instead of this appearing when you search my site (Admin Chatter) in google:

Admin Chatter- Index Page
5 days ago – Admin Chatter - Index. ... SMFAds for Free Forums Admin Chatter 2011, Hillingdon borough, UK; ( Whitebox by, Crip ) · XHTML · RSS · WAP2.

We want it to read:
Admin Chatter- Webmaster discussion forums
Admin Chatter- The best site for webmaster discussion!

How to do it:

SMF:
Open index.template.php and edit the meta tags in there(the meta data is inside <meta tags, for example: <meta description />. OR you can install the easy edit meta tags mod and follow the instructions in there. LINK: http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/i ... p?mod=1211

PhpBB:
You will want to open styles/yourstyle/template/overall_header.html and change:
<meta name="keywords" content="whatever you like" />
<meta name="description" content="whatever you like" />

Note: If you want to know how to do this for other forum software just pm me 🙂


Hope it helps 🙂

The Reverend

P.S: I will make part 2 in the near future, that will include stuff like canonical redirects e.t.c

 

[sapper]

PhpBB:
You will want to open styles/yourstyle/template/overall_header.html and change:
<meta name="keywords" content="whatever you like" />
<meta name="description" content="whatever you like" />

Not quite right :

Keywords should be specific to your genre, and should be relative to organic searches, also you should not get into the habit of keyword stuffing, that is putting about every word related to your genre in the quotes.
Try to keep it simple, like "gaming forum"
Also you can find software like rank checker which will tell you which keywords your competitors rank highly with.

Meta Descriptions should be no more than 250 characters, short and sweet is better than an essay, less is more as they say.


Another thing you should do is optimise your browser titles, instead of it reading your forum.viewtopic666666666, it is much better for SEO if it reads yourforum/ subject

 

[The Reverend]

PhpBB:
You will want to open styles/yourstyle/template/overall_header.html and change:
<meta name="keywords" content="whatever you like" />
<meta name="description" content="whatever you like" />

Not quite right :

Keywords should be specific to your genre, and should be relative to organic searches, also you should not get into the habit of keyword stuffing, that is putting about every word related to your genre in the quotes.
Try to keep it simple, like "gaming forum"
Also you can find software like rank checker which will tell you which keywords your competitors rank highly with.

Meta Descriptions should be no more than 250 characters, short and sweet is better than an essay, less is more as they say.


Another thing you should do is optimise your browser titles, instead of it reading your forum.viewtopic666666666, it is much better for SEO if it reads yourforum/ subject

When I said whatever you like , i thought it would be assumed that I meant things relative to your genre.

 

[sapper]

PhpBB:
You will want to open styles/yourstyle/template/overall_header.html and change:
<meta name="keywords" content="whatever you like" />
<meta name="description" content="whatever you like" />

Not quite right :

Keywords should be specific to your genre, and should be relative to organic searches, also you should not get into the habit of keyword stuffing, that is putting about every word related to your genre in the quotes.
Try to keep it simple, like "gaming forum"
Also you can find software like rank checker which will tell you which keywords your competitors rank highly with.

Meta Descriptions should be no more than 250 characters, short and sweet is better than an essay, less is more as they say.


Another thing you should do is optimise your browser titles, instead of it reading your forum.viewtopic666666666, it is much better for SEO if it reads yourforum/ subject

When I said whatever you like , i thought it would be assumed that I meant things relative to your genre.

I appreciate that, but we do get a lot of forum newbies on here who may take your words literally.

 

[Anthony Scolaro]

Great Tips for optimizing a forum but I disagree when you said

Build Links- Okay, basically, building links is very important to get traffic, and it helps with your PR, the most effective way of building links is doing affiliate or link exchanges. Only do link exchanges with sites who's members will have an interest in what your site is about, otherwise it would be pointless.

Affiliate links or link exchange is the most effective way of link building? That's not true I'm sorry but Google and other search engine hates Affiliate links and link exchange. The most effective way of link building is "Create a blog and write great content that will help users, content that users are searching for, Within the content you can put some links pointing back to your site or just stick to forum posting and blog commenting. Those links has more value than affiliate links and link exchange.

 

[sapper]

Great Tips for optimizing a forum but I disagree when you said

Build Links- Okay, basically, building links is very important to get traffic, and it helps with your PR, the most effective way of building links is doing affiliate or link exchanges. Only do link exchanges with sites who's members will have an interest in what your site is about, otherwise it would be pointless.

Affiliate links or link exchange is the most effective way of link building? That's not true I'm sorry but Google and other search engine hates Affiliate links and link exchange. The most effective way of link building is "Create a blog and write great content that will help users, content that users are searching for, Within the content you can put some links pointing back to your site or just stick to forum posting and blog commenting. Those links has more value than affiliate links and link exchange.

Agree with this too, googles algorithms have changed so that link swaps count for virtually nothing now, affiliates and swaps may have worked a while ago, but not now.

Link building is a long slow process, as has been said, blogs are great for leaving links on, I try to do at least five a day in my genre.
The other thing google likes is internal links, not only do you help google find it's way around your site, but it makes it easier for your visitors to as well.

 

[Anthony Scolaro]

Great Tips for optimizing a forum but I disagree when you said

Build Links- Okay, basically, building links is very important to get traffic, and it helps with your PR, the most effective way of building links is doing affiliate or link exchanges. Only do link exchanges with sites who's members will have an interest in what your site is about, otherwise it would be pointless.

Affiliate links or link exchange is the most effective way of link building? That's not true I'm sorry but Google and other search engine hates Affiliate links and link exchange. The most effective way of link building is "Create a blog and write great content that will help users, content that users are searching for, Within the content you can put some links pointing back to your site or just stick to forum posting and blog commenting. Those links has more value than affiliate links and link exchange.

Agree with this too, googles algorithms have changed so that link swaps count for virtually nothing now, affiliates and swaps may have worked a while ago, but not now.

Link building is a long slow process, as has been said, blogs are great for leaving links on, I try to do at least five a day in my genre.
The other thing google likes is internal links, not only do you help google find it's way around your site, but it makes it easier for your visitors to as well.

Right... 🙂