Perfect SEO For Your Forum..

[Low]

Hey everyone,

Out of the box SMF is already quite optimized for the search engines. If you're looking for the perfect optimized forum I've listed a few mods that can help all which have been used in my high PR forums.

The mods have been easily installed on 1.1.5 - 1.1.6 - & 1.1.7 on the default theme.

Back in the day I'd try and find a cool theme that worked with all mods, impossible! It's much easier to go with the default theme and just modify with css and html and of course.. your own graphics. (need help? just contact me at http://www.yoebo.com or reply below or via a PM.)

1. V-Bulletin style meta tags! <-- creates the perfect optimized meta tags

2. Pretty URL's <-- This mod creates keyword URL's and SEO re-directs the old to the new. (genius mod)

3. Social Bookmarks <-- Adds an "add-this" button to all pages making it easier for your visitors to bookmark you and get you more Page Rank.

4. Feed <-- Adds a RSS Feed Icon to the Board Index for each board. Allows users to easly subscribe to an RSS feed.

This is all I use and my forums are building Page Rank every single day. I hope this helps,

Low

[evil-angelist]

(yoebo.com)

Says it has a SEO Score of 74% how is that perfect?

[brandonroy]

My SEO score is 83%!

[Low]

(yoebo.com)

Says it has a SEO Score of 74% how is that perfect?

LMFAO. Don't tell me, you got that from Alexa right

Yoebo.com PR2, Trolling.com PR0 HAHA.

[Charles Hill]

1 .... meta tags are becoming less and less important.  The title tag is the most important.  The others don't do much.

2 ... making your URLs "pretty" does nothing to improve the way search engines index your site.  Less is more... By using a mod like that, you're just adding more possible breaking points to your site's code (more stuff can go wrong).

3 ... Giving your members' an easy way of submitting your site's pages to social bookmarking sites is good.  Does not necessarily have to be AddThis... I made my own because I didn't want my site to be tied down to another site via a script like that.

4 ... Easily accessible RSS feeds are a useful thing to have, but they don't have much, if anything, to do with SEO.

[aldo]

Actually, Meta Descriptions are somewhat important. When search engines like Google can't find enough relevant text, the meta description tag is used, but yes. Meta tags are becoming less important, at least the keywords tag.

[Jade Elizabeth]

You CAN have a theme that works with all of your mods. You just need to know how to install it.

I make custom themes for people all the time. I ask them to install the mods they want first though so I can work with them, but that in no way means they cannot have mods installed later .

[Low]

2 ... making your URLs "pretty" does nothing to improve the way search engines index your site.  Less is more... By using a mod like that, you're just adding more possible breaking points to your site's code (more stuff can go wrong).

Are you joking? Of course making them pretty does nothing for seo but keywords in the URL DO decide how and what you're indexed for. Fact!

Guys I posted the above to help others. I'm sorry to have hurt your egos and it doesn't mean you are less good at what you do.

[Jade Elizabeth]

I'd be more worried about canonical links...

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

[karlbenson]

Are you joking? Of course making them pretty does nothing for seo but keywords in the URL DO decide how and what you're indexed for. Fact!

Actually not.

The ONLY *slight benefit (and its not 100%) is when people backlink to your site, but don't use an anchor. They use the url.
Then the keywords in the url MIGHT come into play.

Other than that PrettyUrls and similar provide NO other SEO benefits. (Google even says for dynamic scripts like smf its better to use dynamic urls).

[Jade Elizabeth]

^ I will PERSONALLY say this guy is an expert on it, and I would believe anything he said about that stuff, even if he tried to convince me that Google is a god.

[vmgamer]

what about the theme???

[Jade Elizabeth]

What about it?

[Charles Hill]

2 ... making your URLs "pretty" does nothing to improve the way search engines index your site.  Less is more... By using a mod like that, you're just adding more possible breaking points to your site's code (more stuff can go wrong).

Are you joking? Of course making them pretty does nothing for seo but keywords in the URL DO decide how and what you're indexed for. Fact!

Guys I posted the above to help others. I'm sorry to have hurt your egos and it doesn't mean you are less good at what you do.

I doubt you hurt anyone's ego by posting your topic, Low... We were merely making counter arguments to your original post.  If you cannot handle people debating you in a forum, then maybe you shouldn't be posting.

[Jade Elizabeth]

I'd like to remind everyone to be respectful in debates please.

[vmgamer]

I have did it

1. Prettying URLs
2. vB Styling the Meta Tag
3. Costumizing the theme
4. Adding canonicaling tag
5. Nofollowing links in post

and, my forum visitor from google has risen up

[khoking]

V-Bulletin style meta tags does not have a version for SMF1.1 version...

[Jade Elizabeth]

Pretty much any 1.1.x mod will work with other 1.1.x versions, including 1.1.8 .

[khoking]

The suggested vBulletin Style Meta Tags mod does not have SMF 1.1.8 compatibility included:

http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=1138

I tried to install, but it shown some errors and warning.

Any suggestion?

[Jade Elizabeth]

That's because it's a 2.0 mod...that's a whole other version to 1.1 .

I don't have any suggestions, sorry

[vmgamer]

Install it manually :s
100% working

[Low]

I can handle debate and accept all OPINIONS, but trolling is trolling and nitpicking pees me off.

SEF URL's does help towards what you're ranked for!

I also never listen to sources like SEOmoz and other SEO "experts, I strictly rely on hard work and go by the results I get. That way I'm always an expert in this field from my own view.

And yes a few mentioned the Canonical tag mod which I only recently found out about but now highly recommend.

All the best

[patrick6411]

Ok sense we are on the seo topic, I want to ask a content duplicate question. How can google punish a site for dup content when there are so many rss feeds out there?

[Low]

Google duplicate-content punishment is a myth. In fact some of the top PR sites advise you to duplicate their content (article directories.)

The only problem arises across the same domain IE you have article-1 on both example.com/articles and example.com/main/articles etc. If this happens Google will simply choose the URL to list in their index if any at all. And that is where the myth originates.. people weren't seeing the correct pages indexed so they thought they was being punished by Google but simply Google did not want duplicates from the same domain in their index.

Low

[patrick6411]

Google duplicate-content punishment is a myth. In fact some of the top PR sites advise you to duplicate their content (article directories.)

The only problem arises across the same domain IE you have article-1 on both example.com/articles and example.com/main/articles etc. If this happens Google will simply choose the URL to list in their index if any at all. And that is where the myth originates.. people weren't seeing the correct pages indexed so they thought they was being punished by Google but simply Google did not want duplicates from the same domain in their index.

Low

I was thinking in the same line of thought. So maybe I'm not all that crazy!!