5 Tips to Help Make Your Forum Search Engine Friendly
by Michael Posted in SEO, Search EnginesThis is a guest post by Shannon Lilly, a freelance web designer, seo specialist who blogs about Making Money Online.
Today we are looking at forums, vBulletin, PHPbb, SMF, IPB etc…
The actual forum software you choose makes no difference to the search engines and will not help you rank better. However certain software’s, mainly vbulletin and phpbb have a deep member database that develops mods and plugins to make your forum more seo friendly.
We are going to dissect what makes a truly great seo friendly forum; I will explain some basic things we can do to our forums which will help out overall rankings and authority throughout the search engines.
Title Tags
As I am sure you all know the Title Tag is the most important factor when trying to rank for a specific keyword or phrase. The saying (If Its Not In The Title, You Don’t Rank For It) has never been more true then it is today! The title tag is you’re most important on page factor to better rankings for a specific keyword or phrase.
We know this, yet as forum owners we seem to forget the basic principles of the forum titles Sitewide. One of the top negative ranking factors is having duplicate title tags throughout our pages. The same goes for bloggers or any other website which has duplicate title tags.
We need to first and foremost focus on eliminating this problem, since everyone uses different forum software I can only suggest for you to do some research for your specific forum software and ask questions on the support boards about removing the homepage title from your category and post pages. It should just be one to two lines of code in like a header.php file but again I am not sure.
Once this is done you should no longer see the main forum title Sitewide (aka: eliminating duplicate title tags) but let’s not stop there. We can do more to improve our forums seo friendliness.
Good Keyword Use
Another way to improve our forum is by using keywords strategically; forget spamming your description and keyword tags with countless keywords and variations. Instead focus on 5-10 keywords and use them sparingly in these tags. But more importantly on your homepage, when people search for terms and your site appears it will most likely be your homepage. So in essence the homepage should be the MOST seo friendly out of all your pages.
Lets take for example your forum is about pet care, instead of naming your forum topic General Talk, Chit Chat, Anything Goes etc… Name it Pet Care Talk; this appears more specific for the search engines to see. One thing the search engines like is an easy to access and navigate organized website. If you can accomplish that then you’re well on your way to better rankings. Feed the engines what they want and they will return the favors by placing you in higher ranking positions.
Remove Those Graphics
People don’t seem to realize how missing images and images that take forever to load are hindering the search engines ability to access your page. I suggest you fix any missing images, if you have graphics that take more then a split second to load I would eliminate them if possible. If you can’t eliminate them resave them with lower compression settings so you can get your page loading in no more then half a second. Any longer and some visitors will just leave, it’s not all about the seo rankings it’s about visitors and how to grab them and keep them coming back.
What About A Blog?
Another thing that seems to elude forum owners is the need for a blog. A blog has incredible interlinking ability. I suggest you start a blog and try your best to make at least 1 or more post per week.
Just talk about the updates your making to the site, but one thing you must do is link to your forum homepage and specific categories / posts that are popular. Link to them with words and not the URL, this will improve the relevancy inside your site and will help the search engines find your content more easily.
On a final note, forum software’s are usually pretty good at doing SEO right out of the box, but the above tips should help you improve what they did and take your site to the next level. Don’t expect miracle results, seo is a slow process, but these tips and techniques will help get your foot in the right direction to top seo placements!
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I have several forums (more on the way):
http://blabtalk.com
http://fueltalk.net
http://healmart.com/forum
As you can see I really am interested in forums!
I will be using your suggestions on all of them. I am always looking for ways to make them SEO and your article has helped me greatly.
Thanks much!
I have to really agree with Todd Harin, thank you for your helpful website and articles!. I am a newbie at this stuff, but want to start a blog sometime in the near future. I will be using your helpful ideas.
Hi all!
Bye
I realy want to make a forum, but I to worried about I can not maintenance the forum
i dont understand how to make search engine friendly forum, what forum platform you can recomendeed for us!
This is a great post. Thanks for the useful pointers.