Forum SEO

SEO For Your Forum

How to Optimise Your Forum for Search Engines with On Site Optimisation

I have seen many of the same mistakes time and again when posting on forms. If your site is in desperate need of traffic, learn early from these mistakes. Do not underestimate the power of forums to bring organic traffic to your site, and do not neglect optimising your forum as part of your SEO strategy.

So you've just started your forum, and now you need users to contribute to the discussions. But before you can think about gaining users for your forum, you'll need content they can discuss, a format in which to discuss it and your forum needs to be found. This post suggests how to design your forum for users and how to optimise your forum to gain organic traffic from search engines.

Forum Strategy

Like any good business plan, before you stand a chance of making a success of your forum, you need a realistic strategy. Plan the work that you intend to do to introduce your forum to the world.

This strategy should include a time allocation to better understand your market. Research your competitors, find out what they are doing and how you can improve on their sites, introduce new ideas to the market.

Plan how long you will research the keywords and phrases that your competitors have used in their SEO strategy. Spend time to find tools that can aid this research, and don't rely on just one tool.

The plan should include long term and short term goals. Make an estimate of much money and time that you are willing to spend on the initial content. People are not likely to post content in an empty forum. Be realistic, you will need a significant amount of content and debatable conversations for both users and search engines alike. Don't take quick cheap shortcuts unless you want your site to be a cheap insignificant forum that lasts as long in the market as the time taken to start it up.

Keyword and Phrase Research For you Forum

Spend some time becoming familiar with your market. Create a set of keywords and phrases that you believe people would search in order to find a forum in your niche area. Once you have this starting set of keywords, use keyword tools to find the volume of searches per month and other potentially more relevant keywords. Do not optimise you forum just because the keywords and phrases have a high volume of traffic, instead optimise your forum for phrases that are highly relevant.

Find the Natural Ratio of Related Synonyms

So now you have a set of keywords and phrases. However, don't use these phrases to over stuff your content. Research related synonym for these keywords and phrases, and use these synonyms in your content to make your forum easy to read. Increasing the number of synonyms for the related keywords and phrases not only makes it easier to read but increases the relevance of your content for those keywords.

Once you have list of desirable synonyms, you can find the natural ratio by doing a little of your own research. One method to find this ratio would be to query the each of the terms and phrases using an exact match query with your favourite search engine. Simply place the keywords and phrases within quote and find the exact number of results returned for each of the synonym related phrases. Once you've done this for each of the synonym related terms you'll have a good idea of how often these words occur naturally or 'naturally in the indexed internet environment'

So now you have a set of key words, a set of related synonyms and how often each occurs in nature. You can now start using this data to create highly relevant content that is both easy to read for users and tells the search engines exactly what the content is about.

Start Your Forum with Content

If you've just started a forum and there is very little content, both users and search engines will find it hard to know what your forum is really about. Before you start optimising your forum for search engines, make sure their already exists surplus content for the search engines to crawl. You can create this content your self by generating new threads and posts. It's also quite likely you will want optimised content from other users. For your initial content, it's vital that the post and threads are on topic, and created with search engines in mind. If you pay for posters to create content on your forum, or use a Post Exchange system, make sure that the poster is able to generate content that is both discussable and creates organic traffic relevant to your forum niche.

Don't Over Optimise Your Forum - User Friendly

When you start optimising your forum, pay attention to layout and how readable it is for users. You can have the most optimised site in the world, but if it isn't easy for forum users to read, they are not likely to contribute to the discussions. Use keyword and phrases you wish your forum to be found for in category descriptions and category titles, but make it enjoyable to read. Entice your users to post, don't put them off at first glance.

Forum Categories with Many Implied Sub-Categories

When designing the layout of your forum, create niche forum categories that can be split into multiple subcategories. Don't over specify your forum, if you do over specify you'll make it hard for users to create content. Once you've created your forum categories, for each try to think of ten different threads that you could create and discuss immediately. If you can't do this, then there is a good chance you've over specified your forum.

Once users feel comfortable posting in your forum and there is surplus content, you can split the up popular sections of the forum. If you split up the forum sections too early, some parts of the forum may remain desolate.

Name your Forum Images

If you add images to the forum template, try to give them a relevant title that is both related to the forum niche and helpful to the users. Do not underestimate the power of traffic that is produce from image querying. By naming these images, you're not only more like to gain traffic from users querying images, but you're telling search engines and users your image content is related to the niche subject, thus giving your forum more credibility for the subject.

Optimise the Speed of Your Forum

Many of the forum software applications lag slightly behind the times when it comes to up to date methods of search engine optimisation. Although forums have often been designed with performance in mind, there is always room for improvement. Google, Yahoo and many other tool providing vendors now provide great performance tools at no charge. I highly recommend downloading the following tools:

-and then reading this post - to add - performance post-

Validate Code Changes

Many suggest that validating your code will help your forums do better in the SERPs. However, at the time of writing, there is no evidence to suggest validating your code will make any difference to your ranking position. However, you if you do make code changes to the forum template, pass the code through a validator (W3C.com). This may not aid SEO, but it will certainly produce satisfactory code that is more likely to be supported cross platform.