Hey guys, I was just wondering what you guys thought about Forum SEO. I am just starting out with SEO, and as you could guess, I own a forum. Is there anything that should be done differently, when optimizing a forum? Thanks, Josh.
Turn on SE friendly urls. Mine look somewhat like this: mysite.com/forum/subtopic/title-of-post.html and no, I didn't do it with any commercial tools (VBSEO and how they are all called). All free software
Well I did, but only after the forum got pretty popular. You can still do well with phpBB and just convert over when you are ready.
What kind of forum you have? But I don't think SEO will help a forum enough. The first thing you do shall make the visitors belongs to that kind to know your forum. Try some ads and links on similar websites. For example, if you are running a travel forum, I think link or ads from expedia, orbitz will help you a lot.
Yes thats the way to do it .. Make a phpbb forum , put some advertisements , once u get the money , buy Vbulletin .
chezzy62, SEO can be a time consuming and extremely expensive initiative for your site when you're left with the double edged sword of either (a) taking a few years to become an SEO and coding expert OR (b) paying expensive consultants and ungodly amount to poke and prod your site. So... if a proven SEO solution like vBSEO did not already exist, I might even recommend that you just do the basics like build backlinks to your forum and develop lots of quality content with the potential for pulling in decent traffic - and then focus on more general (non-SEO related) marketing techniques to accelerate the successful growth of your forum. However... after about 3 years of continual development by a full time team, vBSEO does exist... I think it is an absolute necessity for vBulletin powered forums that want a competitive advantage in the search engines to get vBSEO-enabled asap. You can find out more information at our vBSEO website. One new section we've added that you might be interested in is our vbseo testimonial cloud where you'll find out just how much our thousands of customers love vBSEO... in a completely uncensored fashion... as you'll soon see!