SEO theme [paid or free]

[engrz]

Hello team

Im creating a new forum related to engineering, for this im in need of fully seo theme so that google track topics from my forum.

Please advise

[margarett]

Choose any theme you like. There is no such thing as a "SEO theme"

[Gary]

Choose any theme you like. There is no such thing as a "SEO theme"

Heh exactly. SEO is not just a myth in the forum world, it's also a back-end feature.

[Biology Forums]

Are you looking for a responsive theme? In that case, it might help your website's ranking in Google.

I agree, SEO is a marketing gimmick.

[roshaoar]

No, SEO isn't a marketing gimmick - that's far too generic a statement. I have sites that get 100s of visitors daily because the content ranks well in Google. But, it's absolutely not something that on its own gets results, and not only that, but people need to be realistic about their expectations. Most people's expectations are vastly inflated and unrealistic, probably due to the things said by snakeoil SEO companies, looking to make a quick buck.

I'm working on a SMF 2.0.* board, modifying it and tweaking it for my needs. Whilst looking under the hood to get it working for me in the way I want, I can already see ways to improve its SEO performance. Not the 'obvious' ways like pretty URLs or various other plugins, although if they hadn't caused me so many issues in my testing before I'd certainly put them in. Remember that the search engines bold the URL part that corresponds to the query and people are more likely to notice and click on that. So you can prove that pretty URLs has an effect, however small and intangible.

But less obvious ways - and really just tiny tweaks to some of the core scripting based on how Google works now, rather than how Google worked a few years ago, which is what default 2.0.* SMF SEO seems attuned to. This in itself is hardly surprising because that's when it was written and it was right for that at the time! For example adding full microdata through to the root (To help Google understand your site), and using h1 for a posts title rather than the site name, etc. Ultimately though people need to realise that SEO results all depend on the content, and unfortunately forum content has been degraded over the last few years in Google's search engine results. Google for example isn't wild about repeated or low quality content, or low signal:noise ratios, and all of these are somewhat unavoidable parts of a forum. I think Google even stopped its forums search service recently, it just doesn't rate forums the way it used to. Not surprising though considering the large variety of other means there are now at people's disposal to interact.

So, in summary: SEO is wildly overpushed leading to hugely unrealistic expectations. But if you know what you're doing, and if you have decent content, it'll help you get noticed.