99.99% of content on most forums is horrible
 

Content is king, right? Then why, as forum owners, do we not create quality content? We spend weeks working on the SEO of our forums or buy neat software like vBSEO, but for what? So the search engines can find our CRAP easier? Your forum might be well optimized, but there are thousands of well paid and VERY smart engineers at Google making sure that the crap our forums produce stay at the bottom of the search results.

I'm guilty of this myself and came to the realization last night. I own a Big-Board and was looking for quality content other people around the internet might be interesed in reading. I quickly came to understand that my forum produces maybe one quality thread per week.

As forum owners, we need to get back to the basics. We must start producing quality content.

Definitely. I spend a large amount of my time editing thread titles to make them more clear and "SEO-able", splitting/merging/moving threads, etc to keep the content as "high-quality" as possible.

Not to mention the "high quality" threads I contribute myself.

The first goal for any forum owner should be to generate valuable content - this will ultimately bring in members who will ultimately begin to generate valuable content for the community themselves. Don't worry about SEO until you have the great content - it's a waste of time!

Yeah? Let's see a couple. Free link right here :D

Here's an exercise for everyone reading this thread. Find two threads on your forum that have been posted in the last three days that you consider to be high quality. Link them here.

I think it is going to be a wakeup call for many...

Well, I consider a thread "high quality" if it results in people coming to the site and/or registering based on a search engine search result.

For example, our technical article threads on CBRXX.com bring in a lot: http://www.cbrxx.com/honda-cbr-xx-technical-articles/

My "Big-Board" site that I recently sold got a lot of hits from the articles also: http://www.fireblades.org/forums/articles/

Define "high quality".

Honestly? Most of those are crap. Why do I say that?

Put yourself in the shoes of a Google engineer. Your sole job is to ensure that the best content for a particular search term gets to the top of the search rankings. If you fail, you're back working phone tech support for a shipping company. You're that engineer and when you search for "honda cbr performance bikes" this comes up as the first result:

http://www.cbrxx.com/honda-cbr-xx-te...er-1996-a.html

Are you going to pat yourself on the back or hope your boss doesn't search for the same thing?

You then search for "how to shorten stock cbr 1100 rear signals" and this comes up:

http://www.cbrxx.com/honda-cbr-xx-te...r-signals.html

1. The images don't show inline.
2. The images can't be seen unless you register.

Do you pat yourself on the back?

PLEASE understand i'm not picking on you. I'm guilty of this myself. My forums suck.

I'm telling you that they bring in search engine hits, which bring in revenue through ad clicks, and also bring in new members since they have to register to view images. So in that respect, yes I am patting myself on the back. CBRXX.com has only been up a few months and already beats out a competing site on many keywords; and that site has been up for over 6 years.

If it brings people to my site and they find what they need, I'm happy.

In the end, that's for you to define. But what do I define as high quality?

1. Content that SHOULD be the in the top three results in Google for a particular query.

2. A thread that people derive some sort of strong benefit from reading. Maybe it makes them laugh heartily, educates them, or makes them think.

3. A thread that, if posted here, would not be able to be completely picked apart by people.

4. A thread that, if read by guests to your forum, makes them think, "Cool, I am going to join this forum."

Here are some popular search terms for my particular niche:

1100xx luggage
1100xx bags
1100xx givi

cbr1100xx luggage (6th place)
cbr1100xx bags
cbr1100xx givi (5th place)

(And I'm actually in the market for a mod to allow guests to see thumbnails, and not full size images. That would allow the pages to be more functional, but still require registration to see the full size images or to post their questions/comments.)