Everyone always says for SEO have good unique articles, with good keyword distribution, good phrases in the H1 and H2 tags, etc. But for forums, theyre aren't really any articles...just the informal content people post, which is usually riddled with spelling mistakes, etc. So, how does one go about search engine optomizing a forum, when theyre aren't really any articles? (Like how was it done for DP?) Thanks!
simple navigation, site map/archive & good quality (regularly updated) post, should help you out. look at digital point (from what i see) it uses default out of the box vbulletin (seo wise) and ranks pretty well in the search engines. forums require that extra bit of patients.
natural growth is the key. we all know DP forums is one of the most if not the most active webmaster/seo forum. webmasters from all over the globe come here all the time.
Aside from actually modifying the structure of the forum, you can post longer, more professional articles yourself under various names throughout the forum.
Is hard to do a established forum in the market ... all what you need is to work on this forum for your users and community. Regards
For Forums: (1) Bring Traffic (2) Bring Quality Posts (3) Implement Some Creative/New Idea (4) Easy Navigation (sitemap)
You still have "articles" on forums - they are just pages of content that use HTML markup just the same as a static web page, so you can treat SEO in the same way. Key areas to watch out for: - is your forum software SEO friendly? - does it produce SEO friendly URLs, - does it create duplicate content (printer versions, etc), - does it make use of Meta, title, H1 markup, etc. You can usually sort all these things out via mods and template changes. Forums also bring out unique SEO benefits - as you mentioned - spelling mistakes can be great for catching typo traffic for example and if you build a reasonably active community then you will end up targeting search terms that you didn't know existed. One of my older sites now gets a lot of traffic from a single search term - I found this from a popular forum thread and decided to optimise a static article for the term - now it's number 1 and brings loads of traffic. The main key is building content. Start off your forums with only a few sub forums and populate those with your own threads (and setup different usernames and respond to them). As these become popular and people begin to use them then start to expand your forums to cover more niche subjects. It's just like settting up a new site - you don't create loads of categories / navigation before you have the content - you start off with a few pages of general content, then expand into more niche areas as time goes on. MG