Does adding a forum to my site help with SEO

It would provide lots of additional content to the site if it became popular. But would it help, or would search engines see it as a minor forum and ignore it?

Also if I did create a forum I would hate to see it empty. I currently get around 40-50 unique people a day. Would that be enough to sufficiently populate the forum?

 

I think you should improve the traffic for existing site to 1000+ daily then add forum to it. Forum do help greatly as per bringing in traffic. Only its very difficult to manage.

 

Forum is a great help on your site especially if it is gaining a high traffic.

 

IMO, it gives more help i building you site.

 

If you can make your forums popular it's a good technique to drive traffic to your site and become visible to top search engine. You just need to double your effort to attract members because it depends on the niche of your forum and how they enjoy staying at your forum. Forums also need to be moderated because there is a lot of spammer out there talking non-sense topic.

 

This is all very true, although I think the first part best answers your question. A forum can be very helpful, if and only if it's very high traffic, and well populated. Your readers will link from other sites to threads they find important or interesting. It's always better to get organic links, and that's the true benefit of running a forum.

But 50 visitors a day probably isn't enough to sustain a forum. I might be unique in this, but I might not: when I see an empty forum, like a ghost town, I think less of the site. So my advice would be to wait until a forum by itself is viable, and then enjoy the benefit.

 

For a forum, you'll have about 1% of the visitors of the forum actually contributing content. If you don't have the traffic and discussions already from a blog to support an active forum, then your energies would be better spent on some blog posting and encouraging comments on the posts.

Once you gain readership, then you can start pushing over to a forum to get more user generated content.

CH

 

In your case i wouldn't, it won't be active and will just create more pages that your sites link equity will be spread over.

Also the content won't be that rich, i'd spend the time writing a quality article a day and publish that.

 

You could always populate your forum using a populating script running off of yahoo answers api. Or pay people to post, but i agree. An empty forum is not a good look!

 

Both of these ideas in practice look worse than an empty forum. People look at the amount of raw information available in a forum, but the next most important thing to a lot of people is the signal to noise ratio.

 

Forums help because of the constant new content it supplies to your site. Make sure you guide your visits to post about specific topics related to your site, though, to boost your keywords. You could also allow visitors to leave comments for articles you write, with guidance of course, and this will help as well.

 

If you are going to use a forum as a means of adding new content to your existing Web site, the first thing you should do is make sure the forum is installed in a directory of your site rather than a subdomain since the subdomain will be treated as a separate domain by the search engines. The next thing you'll have to do is use your robots.txt file to block every generated "page" from the forum script that is not a topic or index (such as your membership roll, who's online, search and other "pages" for instance). Not only will this help prevent duplicate content from being caught by the search engines, but it'll also help to keep the search engines focused on the pages you want them to index (namely your threads) which will help cut down on the bandwidth consumed by the spiders as they crawl the generated pages and index your forum.

Now, here's the second thing you need to consider. If you're going to slap a forum on your site and call it a day (or worse, use it for "SEO purposes"), you probably shouldn't be adding a forum in the first place. A forum should be a value-added asset that will improve the value of your site to your users. If you have a little bit of cruddy content on your site, then the forum really won't help you much. However, if you're producing qualitiy articles and adding other unique relevant content that people would kill their own mothers to have (or link to), you'll find it easier to build up the necessary userbase to make a forum a viable addition to your site (not only that, but your repeat visitors will be able to better tell you what topics your forum should cover since they'll be the primary users in the first place).

 

Forums are great for Community building which can build brand awareness. If your trying to get links focus on quality content, but forums are awesome for community building and brand awareness.

 

Make unique and usefull posts by different usernames on different themes adn topics to attract others to post, new forum must not look empty.