As the title suggests, I was wondering if there are any particular SEO benefits of starting an online forum in a related domain. Any thoughts appreciated. Many thanks in advance!
Your website can have permanent visitors including increasing new visitors. Your website will be updated by users with new content. It will help to make strong site.
Many thanks MarshalSeo. That sounds interesting, of course depends on how the forum picks up with users. Are there any forum marketing tools?
You have to get out there and advertise it yourself. In regards to SEO, if you get a lot of visitors and posts then you start to have a massive amount of pages that are referenced with the SE's which = more visitors due to searched and more pages indexed.
Lots of benefits of course. but you need some time to get some hits especially if you're just starting. SEO will give your more traffic that make your site strong and popular.
You can begin with a forum population service to get posts going as you bring on new visitors and hopefully new members. Also try to pick a controversial niche or topic that people love to discuss. That will increase the amount of posts and users. Another thing that really helps is to structure your forums as an offering. For instance, let's say your forums are in the spirituality niche. Instead of having every spiritual subject under the sun covered in the forums, create a process for your members that will help them grow. For instance, you could base the forums around a structure in the niche. For spirituality, it could be the chakra system or animal totems. It takes some creativity, but you make them unique, and you provide actionable, informative articles within the structure of the forums (rather than on separate pages) to encourage people to post in relation to the information, and share additional thoughts or questions. A great forum that did something similar to this is Erowid. They have a section of their site for people to share their personal experiences using the substances their site discusses. Because it's a controversial topic and people are sharing their personal experiences, posts there are very high.
SEO wise you will have a lot of relevant content to the topic of your site created by the users (which means much less work for you). So, the changes of people stumbling into your website through search engines for that specific topic is much greater.
Well, the benefits are that you can get some really good content that is related to your domain and other keywords - and helps your rankings. But, if the forum, is not active, this cannot happen. It is very hard to make a forum active, so be sure that is something you can achieve before embarking on this course.
Forums are the best thing for SEO if they are successful. Plenty of content naturally builds links and keywords everywhere. BUilding a forum community is another story all together. I think the best way ti to find 5-10 people to run/build your forum before you even register a domain name. Otherwise it will be just you talking to yourself for a long time