A basic guide to SEO and Online Forums
Submitted by Ari on Sat, 07/14/2007 - 22:46.
As previously mentioned, I'm currently working on search engine optimizing a Simple Machines Forum (AKA SMF).
I recieved some emails asking for more information about the specific steps one can take to make their forums more search engine accessible. Specifically, their forums have the common of problem of content being thrown into Google's supplemental index.
Here are a few SEO suggestions which may help (in no particular order of importance):
- Implement search engine friendly URLs (Instead of forum.com/index.php?thread=23423234%post=2343, forum.com/title-of-thread). Luckily, you don't have to implement this manually on SMF: It can be achieved via the use of a .htaccess modification and the SEO4SMF plugins.
- Prevent duplicate and non-useful content from being indexed by using a robots.txt file and/or Meta tags (meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"). Common examples of duplicate and non-useful content are printer-friendly versions of pages and user profile pages.
- Add a sitemap, both spider-readable (.xml) and human readable (.html) versions. This task can be automated as well with the SMF Sitemap Mod.
- If you use an image for a logo, add alt tags to it with your forum's name and a one sentance explanation of the topics it covers.
- Ensure meta description and keyword tags are being properly generated for each page. (Although most search engines do not take the meta description tag into significant consideration when determining your place in search results, a more descriptive meta description will result in more humans clicking your link, which in return is thought to improve your search rankings).
- Make title tags more descriptive - not appropriate for all forums, but if you have a number of very specific boards you can append the board name to each posts title tag, increasing its keyword relevancy.
- Add dynamic content to forum homepage - A list of links to yesterday's most popular threads works well.
- Allow users to add descriptive alt="" tags when uploading images, or tags when creating new messages
As more ideas pop into my head I will post them here -
Submitted by Paul -Thanks (not verified) on Thu, 07/19/2007 - 08:51.
Thanks for your reply, I understand it now
Regards
Paul
Submitted by New Media Ari (not verified) on Wed, 07/18/2007 - 22:31.
The .htaccess file doesn't actually contain any keywords or description information. What the .htaccess file does it tell the Web Server Software (and a module for it called mod_rewrite) how to interpret the contents of your website. For example, using the .htaccess file you can instruct your web server to take anyone that goes to www.mysite.com/oldpage.html and automatically forward them to www.mysite.com/newpage.html.
Similarily, if you run software which is search engine friendly, in many cases it will use .htaccess and mod_rewrite to convert "unfriendly" urls, for example make www.mysite.com/index.php?pg=2 appear as www.mysite.com/newpage.html instead.
So, in order to make your Simple Machines Forum search engine friendly you must:
1) Ensure that Mod_Rewrite is supported and enabled by your hosting company (email / call them to find out)
2) Copy the .htaccess file that came with SEO4SMF into the root directory of your forum (I.e. where SMF's index.php is)
In some cases, you may have to modify the contents of the .htaccess file to make it compatible with your webhosting company's configuration. An explanation of how to do that is beyond this reply; check out the SEO4SMF forum for more info.
Submitted by paul (not verified) on Wed, 07/18/2007 - 06:20.
Hi just read your article, and installed the SEO4SMF plugin
But Im not to sure an what to put into the htaccess at the bottom, do I place the meta tags in there
Thanks
halfpint