Adding a forum a good idea ?

Would adding a forum to my website which is about a celebrity help the actual website get more pages indexed?

If a lot of the forum posts/ comments will contain the keywords I am targetting, would this help my ranking? Or are forums not that good?


Thirdly, and a bit off topic - how much is the average cost of getting a wordpress website professionally SEOd, to get rid of duplicate content, apply the correct no follow links, etc. ?

 

I don't know exactly, but I believe Google is okay with forums that are seo optimized, but I believe the score is lower for that content versus actual static pages. However, if you look at DP as an example, their pages get indexed like crazy. So I don't know for certain... but I believe it will help you in the long run, after you have built up a large active membership.

New forums probably won't help a lot, but after a year of posting, and the fact that googlebot sees that content changes every 20 minutes or something like that will in turn update googlebots opinion of your site. Gotta love the google search engine algorithm.

As far as the question about the website being indexed. The pages of the forum will be indexed, but the landing page to your site won't get indexed. If something is indexed by Google, I believe it is just the final destination link that is indexed.

For example, www.digitalpoint.com doesn't get indexed because someone posts every hour about a topic on forums.digitalpoint.com. Even the forum address doesn't get indexed, but the thread link is indexed.

What you probably need to do is make certain there are plenty of pages on your forum linking back to your main page. You could create a section in the forum about the main site, and have links to different items on that page, from that section of the forum. Then add a quick links section or something like that which links back to the main site, and make regular posts in your forum, with the main site link in your signature.

In the end backlinks is what will get you indexed the quickest. I really don't know what SEO companies charge, but I have heard, it is better that you learn SEO yourself and do it on your own first, and then employ the services of an SEO professional. This way you know a little of what they are trying to accomplish, and you won't get ripped off, by false guarantees of page rank.

 

Thanks a lot for your advice! My site is a bit new so I think I will hold the forums off until I get at least 1k uniques per day.

Regarding SEO, I do know a little but I have created this new wordpress website because I heard it's so easily SEO-able and downloaded plug-ins to help with that. However, I posted this thread http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=615228 asking for some help to see if I've done things right and it seems no one is interested in helping. I do realize it's quite a bit to ask for free so no probs.

Therefore, I want to make the most of my time so I don't want to have to wait 2 months and see where I am Google wise then.

 

I'll check it out... and as far as help, I have PM'd you about that. Thanks.

 

If you have good amount of traffic then it adds some value to the site.......

 

forums help, in my personal experience, but you need to moderate them well to stop you keyword density dropping