Making your Smf forum as SEO friendly as possible? How to Tips

[syntaxera]

i put the mod in.... now my entire site will not show up, and will not delete the mod. 
www.DeadTix.info

[zerog12avity]

@zerog12avity: add ;xml to your sitemap address (url/forum/index.php?action=sitemap;xml) and it will work just fine.
I tested it and it's ok, google will accept it this way.

Thanks ccraciun. It worked.

[protonxl]

1.) Register for Google Webmaster Tools: Visit their site, sign up for a free account. Validate your authority over your site by either placing a coded META tag on your index page (not that easy for SMF) or placing a coded name file in your root (easy). Have a look around and discover the various reports including error conditions.

2.) Install SMF Sitemap: SlammedDime's mod to add an XML sitemap to your forum, compatible with SMF 1.1.* thru 2.0b3.1p. This creates a new action for your index.php that dynamically generates an XML sitemap of the current state of your site whenever it is accessed. Then go back to your Google Webmaster Tools and enter the URL to your sitemap so that Google can find it.

Ok, 1st one worked.

The sitemap however did not..

Sitemap type   Web
Format   –
Submitted   7 minutes ago
Last downloaded by Google   6 minutes ago
Status   ERRORS
Total URLs in Sitemap   0
Indexed URLs in Sitemap Help   –

Unsupported file format
Your Sitemap does not appear to be in a supported format. Please ensure it meets our Sitemap guidelines and resubmit.

[青山 素子]

The sitemap however did not..

Make sure you are using the URL to the XML version, not the html version.

[protonxl]

whoops you're right
I just did it with   ;xml at the end, and it worked.



i do wish i could get pretty urls..

[青山 素子]

Why do you want "pretty" URLs? There is no direct SEO benefit.

[ifwmonster]

I use pretty URLs for the users sake and for linking.

Users tend to find it easier to navigate the site and also, if they link something on my site, readers wherever the link is posted will have an easier time determing what the content of the link is.

At least, that is my take on it.

[gallitin]

2.) Install SMF Sitemap: SlammedDime's mod to add an XML sitemap to your forum, compatible with SMF 1.1.* thru 2.0b3.1p. This creates a new action for your index.php that dynamically generates an XML sitemap of the current state of your site whenever it is accessed. Then go back to your Google Webmaster Tools and enter the URL to your sitemap so that Google can find it.

I have installed this, now where does the sitemap.xml file reside at?  I cannot find it.  I'm trying to point the google webmaster tools at this.  I see a sitemap.xml file in my root directory that is from wordpress, but I don't show any sitemap.xml in my root/forums directory.  Thanks for the help.

[Nick Whetstone]

Did you look at http://yourdomain.com/locationofsmfinstallation/index.php?action=sitemap;xml ?

[gallitin]

Yes, your right I found it now, and added. I assume this won't create an issue at all with my wordpress xml?  Thanks

[Nick Whetstone]

You'd have to ask SlammedDime (the Mod author) on the Mod support topic for that, I'm afraid. Sorry I couldn't help.

[Hj Ahmad Rasyid Hj Ismail]

Thanks for the robot.txt tips. Very useful indeed.

[gisfreak]

dear motoko-chan

are your robot.txt can be placed in every smf sites, generally ?

how bout SMF with preety url ? should i remove it first or not ?



BTW thanx for the robot

[青山 素子]

are your robot.txt can be placed in every smf sites, generally ?

It should work fine on any SMF site.

how bout SMF with preety url ? should i remove it first or not ?

It probably won't help.

BTW thanx for the robot

It was originally by Karl Benson, so all credit should go to him.

[gisfreak]

hello motoko-chan, thanx for your reply, just to make sure something 

i saw that the robot using standard SMF URL format, and my SMF using preety url syntax, is it compatible, although different URL style ?

second question

where should i place the robots.txt ? my forum is under /forum not in the root folder ?

and third question

i found in SEO mod, there are SEF mod and pretty URL, what is the different ? i saw that they have same purpose, to make URL more simple and Search engine Friendly. did i miss something on that ?


thanx, GISfreak

[Kindred]

it should be pointed out that NONE of the (so-called) SEO/SEF mods have **ANY** effect on search engines.  The *ONLY* effect they have is to make the URLs look "pretty" for the HUMANS viewing or linking to the site.

[rd]

To tell all ya the truth:

Sitemaps aren't really needed, my forum doesn't gave on yet it's on Google, because SMF is friendly with search engines.

PrettyURLs and SimpleSEF stink, yes they do. I used them and my database increased a lot >.> after I removed them I didn't find any sort of decrease or anything.

Robot.txt isn't really needed unless you want bots to not come to your site.

The few SEO methods I know (only 1 to tell you the truth), requires access to a big database, dedicated server or VPS, and some coding. I personally never done it but I've seen a professional do this and was suprised by the traffic! Our sites are almost the same except his is a bit more referenced, anyways in about 5 months he got asmany members as mine and mine was 2,000, not to mention all those pageviews >.<

Anyways this is my two cents.

[青山 素子]

Sitemaps aren't really needed, my forum doesn't gave on yet it's on Google, because SMF is friendly with search engines.

Sitemaps are good if you need to specifically indicate every URL you want indexed. If your pages are all linked already, it's not urgent.

PrettyURLs and SimpleSEF stink, yes they do. I used them and my database increased a lot >.> after I removed them I didn't find any sort of decrease or anything.

URL rewriting will increase load, that's to be expected. Removing the rewriting stuff should have decreased load, however.

Robot.txt isn't really needed unless you want bots to not come to your site.

Using special rules in robots.txt can help eliminate indexing of duplicate content pages to begin with, which should decrease load and bandwidth usage. For SMF 1.1, it can also help block duplicate content that didn't get added to the noindex list.

The few SEO methods I know (only 1 to tell you the truth), requires access to a big database, dedicated server or VPS, and some coding. I personally never done it but I've seen a professional do this and was suprised by the traffic! Our sites are almost the same except his is a bit more referenced, anyways in about 5 months he got asmany members as mine and mine was 2,000, not to mention all those pageviews >.<

Most of the most effective SEO tactics can be done with any kind of hosting as they all deal with the content of things.

[rd]

http://writingcenter4.info (Enjoy all things Harry Potter from Dark Harry, to romance and Femslash) the webmaster is a proffesional and I know because I saw some of his old works and because I have a lot of contact with him.

Anyways, his forum is like 7 months old and he barely has  any of the SEO stuff like sitemap and he's still using 2.0 RC2.

In these 7 months most of the content he added was automatically generated but manually add (it's more of a reference site). He has more content then me but not much user activity yet he managed to support a dedicated server for 5 or so months on user donations.

His pageviews and signups increased dramatically in the first few months and now it's bigger then mine. Last month the site got sponsered and the server got updated to Quand Core (I think) with 4 GB RAM and 500 GB of space.

Even though he never told me how he managed, a close friend explained and now I understand it. Even though I understand it, I doubt I can do anything like that...

PS: The prettyURLs mod increased my mySQL database because of all the saved stuff >.> 

[meko me]

VB seo = 10/10
ipb seo = 10/10
smf seo = ? imho it's a big 0

smf knows this bt keep on releasing betas wt so many bugs in them.they are nt working on the imp stuff.

-meko