Hello, what are the most user friendly and SEO friendly forum platforms to use ? Keep in mind user "friendly" applies to admin mostly . Cost is also a factor .
Paid: would have to be vbulletin Free: would have to be phpbb though make sure its kept updated to the latest version.
what type of web person do I want to set this up , is this standard knowledge for webmasters , or specialized ? i am on a budget and would like to set up a forum ,can i do it cheaply? thank you
MyBB factually has no known security flaws. And for SEO any forum software should be tweaked manually for SEO imho. The out of the box versions don't take everything into consideration and SEO is more of an artform than exact science.
thank you , good stuff ,now I would like to use the forum for a industry watering hole and possibly sneak a little edge for my own business , the question are forums generally good for ranking high , or irrelevant?
If you can get daily activity forums are one of the best ways to get indexed and high ranking. Forums with activity represent fresh relevant content that the search engines just love.
Forums are known for their long tail keywords. This mean's that many forums do not rank high in terms of popular keywords, but they do rank high for unpopular keywords. This is the long tail effect. Forums provide many keywords which search engines use to index your site. Read more about it here... http://www.vbseo.com/blogs/joe-ward/what-search-long-tail-145/ Btw, I think vbulletin + vbseo is well worth the money. With my current earnings with the forum + vbseo, it paid for it in a day. lol
I put a lot of work into getting my forum's threads ranked for potential long tails. See: http://www.forumdr.com/getting-the-search-engines-to-index-all-of-your-threads/140/