What's the best way to SE Optimize your FORUM? Anyone?

[platinummack]

I read this thread and the moderator said it is useless for Forums.

http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=427913.0

What do you think?
Any advice?

[Kindred]

I think your question is actually answered in that thread.

Attempts to "optimize" a forum are mostly wasted.

I use Optimus Brace, but more for the actual user vie than any "seo benefit"

and prettyurl mods are almost completely a waste for Search engines.

[platinummack]

Yes, I think SEO is becoming somewhat antiquated as social media presence is really the key to traffic now and also to SEO,yes?
Now in terms of SEO I guess I could add meta tags, a title and description  as that can only help yes?

[Kindred]

And what will you put into the meta tags for description?

[platinummack]

My board is about social dynamics, dating, confidence, dating advice, how to attract women, self mastery. Most posts will have these keywords.

[Kindred]

In which case, the keywords will serve no purpose at all, since the uniqueness of each keyword is weakened by the overuse.

[platinummack]

Okay so then would you say that SEO is redundant for FORUMS. Any tips you have for this?
Once again, I could grow it by social media promotion, the way I grew my Facebook group to over 6K members right?

[Arantor]

There is a reason that there is a topic in this board entitled 'Forum SEO is a myth' Yes, social media promotion is one very strong method.

[platinummack]

I also think that SEO for the main site is also not as effective even if you go about it the White Back way. You need to get inbound links from Social media to raise that even.

However in terms of my main site, any suggestions with respect to SEO or do you recommend for me ( I am already doing this) to really use Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, FB and such to attract loads of traffic and also forums?

Thanks

[platinummack]

So any tips on how to grow a forum other than what I am already doing which is
social media marketing, writing awesome content, etc?

[Kindred]

That is really the only way.

[Biology Forums]

If you want the best SEO, I would suggest leaving everything the way it is. In your robot.txt, however, I would suggest omitting print pages. The best SEO practice is to have a lot of content that is original; you won't get recognized by Google or Bing or Yahoo any other way. To put it in perspective, if you create a thread on my forum, it will be added onto Google within a minute - I haven't performed a single SEO modification since starting my community. This took a lot of hard work, however, years of maintaining the website.

[platinummack]

Okay so I want to be picked up for PUA forums, PUA forum, Seduction forums, dating advice forums
So what I can do is to author content with these keywords in the Title or body yes?
Also, what about getting a domain name like maaximumpuaforums.com
Any other thing I can do?
What about a sitemap for the forum? How do I install that?
My main site has a site map that is regularly updated but what about one for the forum?
Will that help?

[platinummack]

Also I can see that Google indexed my previous threads, so I can use this to put keywords in them and the content. However, do you know how long it takes for a thread to be picked up by Google and indexed?

[Kindred]

1- keywords are useless. Google ignored them at this point.
2- sitemaps -- there are a dozen mods that will create sitemaps.  Personally I like Optimus Brave
3- googe searches and scans as it wants.   Sometimes you'l get picked up in 24 hours... other times it may take weeks

[platinummack]

I just contected about 50 guys in the dating coaching sphere either as potential students or teachers and they are promoting it to 1000s of their friends and just joined my forum right now in numbers. I created a canned, msg on FB and sent them an invite. They are ecstatic.

[platinummack]

With Optimus Brave, can you also create vanity or SE friendly URLS?
Can you add meta tags to posts?
What is this thing with robot.txt . I hear something about that?

[platinummack]

What do you also think of this?

http://www.smfseo.net/

Pretty URLS mode?

[Kindred]

no. Optimus brave does not do pretty urls -- because they are absolutely useless when it comes to SEO.

as for other variations of prettyurls...   they all are known to cause issues with various mods (although I understand the smfseo mod to have slightly fewer problems)  I have never used any pretty urls mods and my sites get indexed and found just fine

[platinummack]

So optimus
it allows you to disallow certain content from being indexed via robots.txt? Well I want everything to be indexed.
It creates a site map and updates it?
What about a section to add meta tags, h1, title tages to each of my post pages or to the main index?
So you are saying the pretty urls are useless? I have used them on my blog and got a lot of traffic for those keywords.

[Biology Forums]

"So you are saying the pretty urls are useless?"

Yes, don't go that route. It adds so much code to your forum, and queries, that in the long-run, will hurt your community.

[platinummack]

Okay so I am simply just going to use Optomus Brave
I just created a site map
and left everything else as default.
I will of course get backlinks back from high PR sites
I will use socialmedia to promote it
I will also write original content continually as I have been doing and put the keywords, in Title and content as the author that I want to be ranked for.
cool?

[Biology Forums]

Also, another piece of advice. I would answer social-related questions people have on Yahoo! Answers. Build a reputation up there. Of course, you want to do an good job answering those questions as it will help build a clientèle.

Please keep in mind that there is no short, easy fix to this problem. If your site has, let's say 1000 topics, that's nothing compared to a website of the same niche that has 100,000 topics. It's really a numbers game, coupled with good quality, original content.

[Kindred]

SMF already has an H1 tag.

Optimus Brave helps with the title tags.

What are meta keywords or meta descriptions going to say on a forum where every post is user generated content?

Yes, pretty urls are buck useless for SEO.

[platinummack]

in the WYSWYG editor how do you embed content as H1?

[margarett]

You don't. And you shouldn't do it in any other way, also.

SMF already has a h1 tag in the template. So if you  add another one (or even several, in multiple posts), you will have penalties in search engines.

[platinummack]

What I am asking is you have already said that it has an H1 tag
so what does that mean?
How does it know what line or content to apply it to?

Let's say I have a title

Sample Post Title

Content-blah blah blah
A B C

I want blah blah blah to be h1, how do I do that?
Or does it automatically make the title of the post h1?

[platinummack]

Also, this are my default settings for the mod Optimus
Is this okay?
Do I have to do anything with meta tag verification. I think Kindred said no
What about robots.txt?

[Kindred]

Meta tags don't really matter with forum content.

As for h1. Smf has the h1 alreayd defined in the template... And no, it is not the post title.
You would have to manually modify several template files to change  the way the h1 is handled.

[ge master]

@platinummack, with respect to your inquiry, I would suggest webmasterworld when it comes to what's smart these days in terms of forums and SEO. You are seemingly getting one strong opinion here on how you "should" do things and what you "shouldn't" care about. If you want to base you decisions on one opinion, your choice. I would far more trust webmasterworld. I may know a few things, but it would be a disservice to tell you "don't do this", because frankly I would sound like a know-it-all and if I was possibly wrong? I would be doing you an even bigger disservice.

Consider one thing in all this. If you look in Google for SMF related searches, more times than not, you're going to get directed to this forum. It may be because there is a lot of SEO or it may be because there isn't a lot of competing websites. In other words, a lot of this isn't about SEO nowadays. URL's made to look nice is more a matter of a clean user experience. I think meta description is the most valuable information that you can utilize, so go for that. At the very least that will help people click through to your article based on the search engine results page. A mod that picks out a decent meta description is the challenge.

One word of note is to have a look at your forum urls. Those don't rewrite properly. You may have changed the default forum name or category for example, but does the url say "general-discussion"? If you are changing your categories and forums around, just make sure that you have what you think you have. I found this problematic, but thankfully I realized what was going on. Is this SEO related? I think so. General Discussion says NOTHING about what the category is about.

I would say ugly url's suck, but that's just me. This forum is going fine in terms of getting ranked with ugly url's but perhaps it's a question of competing sites rather than ugly url's not mattering.

I would take a peek at what some big forums are going with regards to their urls and meta descriptions.

[Arantor]

It may be because there is a lot of SEO or it may be because there isn't a lot of competing websites.

Considering that this forum is mostly stock at least far as SEO is concerned... but I would suggest you completely missed the single biggest thing SMF does with SEO... every install contains a link back to here. That *alone* dominates how SMF got its ranking and since the links also include 'SMF' and 'Simple Machines' as part of the link text... yeah that's how that's a thing.

SMF's meta description is not ideal but this is also one of the foibles of using user-generated content (as opposed to curated content a la blogs), is that you can't actually rely on users writing good copy at any point.

Though Google itself has been saying for years now they don't want people to write websites aimed at search engines but to write content aimed at *people*.

Is this SEO related?

People seem to think it is, but all evidence suggests that it doesn't make nearly as much difference as it used to from an SEO point of view, at least again from a UGC point of view, because that presumes the community will all make keyword rich titles and so on (which almost never happens, and communities tend to revolt with admins that go around changing everything)

[ge master]

Search engines always turn to the authority first. As in, if I search Google help or Google advice related searches, Google will dominate the top of the results. So if I have Joe's Google Help Forum, I'm not going to outrank Google, ever. Case in point? The SEO or lack of SEO on this forum shouldn't be the basis for making decisions on what does or doesn't work. Additionally, there may be a handful of SMF help articles out there, but certainly there aren't websites dedicated to troubleshooting. I think that's an accurate comment. Thus, the SMF forum itself has next to zero competing websites to deal with.

@platinummack, my big advice is to verify the urls for the forum categories make sense, especially if you have been changing them around. Also, you may want to redo that screenshot. I couldn't see it properly. Cheers!

[Arantor]

Except I wasn't trying to assert that it was. I was asserting that this place is not necessarily authoritative for the reasons you assert, because there are other reasons - like a bajillion backlinks here that all have highly keyword dense terms referencing SMF seeing how just about *every* install has a backlink here. You cannot convince me that the PR8+ references for the front page aren't related to that.

There are two websites in addition to this site that are actually dedicated to SMF support aside from this one.