ProBoards (and I think XenForo too) are the only forum softwares that I know are SEO-ready as soon as you set them up, without the need to submit them to SEO yourself. This would suggest that you could get new members through these platforms instantly as long as you put in meta tags and stuff for it to actually work. I don't even know if any forum software would have this trick, even for Jcink (as your forum is on its own domain name when you set it up). Let's talk about it, peeps.
Eh? What do you mean? I think you may have misunderstood what SEO actually is.
SEO is basically making your site easier to digest, navigate and find for bots. The bots in turn use the additional information you provide to use against you, help you acquire new users or even call back existing ones.
I don't know about Proboards, but XenForo even 2.0, isn't actually that up-to-date with the latest SEO trends, particularly the schema.org schemas, sure it covers a lot of bases, but there is still a fair bit of work to be done.
To be fair though, the entire market is like that, even I have to deal with these new schema and changes which popped out of nowhere during the last few months. It's even worse for the ones like XenForo who take years to adjust, although SEO does reach a point of diminishing returns after a certain point.
SEO isn't just setting up a bunch of meta tags or schema either.
Simply making a tweet will make it easier for a bot to find the site and maybe pique it's interest.
Backlinks are a misnomer. Simply creating more links is not going to help you.
You need links which help people, as in, humans discover that you exist.
If you're small enough, then backlinks might be somewhat useful in announcing your existence to the world for good and for bad.
If it's not a real site like Twitter and some backwater "high page rank aggregator link directory" site, then that's akin to link fraud and Google's algorithm is constantly adapting to tackle that garbage.
If you subscribe to the notion of the "semantic web" aka Web 3.0, however then there could be a lot of opportunity for certain SEO optimisations in the near future, particularly geared around Microdata and not just from Google.
The one thing I despise about the semantic web however is how it can utterly wreck privacy by linking your identity across many sites in a very subtle way without you even realising it and every random joe analysing and processing that net.
And someone doesn't even need you to flat-out "link your account" to another site, they can deduce it with enough information about provided about you in a machine readable form like gender, location, age, etc.
With each piece of data, you can eliminate more duplicates and zone in on someone.
The whole Person schema is a stalker's dream and can be outright dangerous the further you go with it.
It really doesn't take that many data points to zone in on someone. Really.
Thank goodness XenForo have no clue how Microdata is actually supposed to be used with the occupation one or with the URL for the "Person" type. This evil thing is a stalker magnet and exists simply because of "SEO".
If you must use it for SEO, limit it to simply associating a single user with all their posts across a site, perhaps you might need to markup their name, but never ever ever mark-up personal information with this disgusting vile thing.
I would rather have lower SEO than to have someone's blood on my hands from being harassed.
Maybe, I shouldn't be too harsh on that software, but do realise that if every site standardises serving personal information to bots in the same way, then it won't take much to cross-reference data from tens of thousands of sites.
Occupation, interests, gender, age, location (even a vaguety), etc.
Perhaps even stronger, if it's something particularly exotic or an exotic combination for one of those.
The problem isn't SEO, the problem is people. I just acquired a large forum (PS4Forum), and a user was being a pest. Once I told him I wasn't going to do something (GDPR related), he goes on Twitter and plays the victim. But in reality, he was harassing me the whole time. I get locked out of my account, but he's the one who started the whole thing.
