Forum SEO is a challenge because the average member isn't going to have SEO in mind when creating content. If you try to force members to use SEO-friendly methods, you will likely scare them away and hurt the activity of your forum.
So what tactics are you taking to solve these challenges?
I've recently been starting to add a section on the content bottom (above the footer) of my community that outlines what that section is (apart from the actual forum description at the top/hover over) when you enter that given area. I'm aiming for this to be specifically for search engine crawlers rather than people to use since it can be >100 words and not really hugely unattractive/noticeable, but add more details that metadata may not place due to size limits.
To be honest I've never really worried about SEO either. That's primarily due to having a captive audience in that most of the forums I've ever owned have been linked to, or provided a service.
Having said that, modern forum software seems to make a pretty good job of it anyway.
Slightly off topic I guess but SEO has always made me smile a little in that those that evangelize about it the most often load their registration process up with so many deterrents you'd lose the will to live before you could actually get registered. That seems a little counter productive to me 🙂
Well, I said nothing and that's part;y true that I have done nothing in the last year. That being said though from the start I had done SEO. Not always had positive results though as it's mostly not real traffic and might be lucky yot get a couple of new signups, yer or but it wasn't about that.
IPB has you suited anyway with their built-in meta and whatnot in the system that you can play around with. SEO is done stop working as flip.
