Forum SEO - Does it really matter?

[KTBleeding]

I'm curious to know what everyone thinks about this. Obviously, enough vB users think it does matter as products like vBSEO have quite a few customers. However, I don't see the point of it, perhaps someone can shed some sort of light on me here.

SEO itself is awesome. There's no denial there. But I feel that it's more important on your actual site content, rather than forum topics and posts. Out of the hundreds of thousands of popular forums that are out there, I would say that only a tiny fraction of their posts could be considered useful. Most of the others are dramatic, ridiculous, or just plain stupid and senseless.

I guess my question is, why do so many people want to try harder to get meaningless posts indexed in search engines? I think it's a much better idea to focus it on the main website content itself as content is king in a website, and not the community.

As I said earlier, it's obvious that people disagree with this since they're willing to pay well over $100 dollars to achieve it. So enlighten me.

[EnIgMa1234]

What it does is give your a better ranking with search engines (search engine optimization).
If you were to search google for e.g football, many sites have that word but with SEO it narrows the choice down.

E.G showthread.php?t=50 -> football-play-t56.html

Which would give better results in google.

It just narrows down the results which will attract more visitors to your site. You then have a better change of those visitors clicking adsence.

Hope that helps

[Alfa1]

I agree that content (Keyword density) is one of the most important things. Still products like vbSEO and NuSEO have a additional value. Even to improve keyword density. Wouldn't it be nice to exclude parts of your forum that have unrelated content, from being indexed by search engines? It would up your overall keyword relevance.

[Lizard King]

Forums are made from threads and if you really know how to SEO your board you have a really succesful weapon in your hand. For example you can easily disable indexing your showpost pages which will create 99% duplicate content. Also you can disable some of your chit chat forums and focus on the real content of your board. You can manually do lots of template edits and remove unnecessary url's from guest eyes which will higher your rankings , you can use a header structure for your site and get better keyword density and if you merge all these with a good seo product then you will have a perfectly seo optimized board. How can this help ? Get number 1 spot in google rankings in 2 days after thread creation within 2-3 million results. So yes SEO optimization is really important.

Let me try to give an example when you validate this page and check show outline option the result you get is :

h1 - The Official vBulletin Modifications Site.

h2 -    * Forum SEO - Does it really matter?

Because the style is edited , however it is not edited well enough from my point of view.

If you check a default vBulletin page you can't see any header structure which really sucks.

However if you check a thread on good optimized board the result you get is

h1 - Site Name

h2 -   * keyword
h3 -          o keyword
h4 -                + Rply: keyword

As you can see i have the same keyword repated in header tags + you can also have the keyword in your url and it will increase your rankings. I have this on my board if you want you can easily check thread and see.Thats why vBSEO is a really good program. It nearly does 60% of the job but if you have the knowledge and complete the reaminng 40% then you'll also have a perfectly seo optimized board.

[KTBleeding]

Originally Posted by EnIgMa1234

What it does is give your a better ranking with search engines (search engine optimization).
If you were to search google for e.g football, many sites have that word but with SEO it narrows the choice down.

E.G showthread.php?t=50 -> football-play-t56.html

Which would give better results in google.

It just narrows down the results which will attract more visitors to your site. You then have a better change of those visitors clicking adsence.

Hope that helps

I understand that and all, but what exactly are you attracting members to? They go to the site, and in most cases will see a bunch of people boasting their opinions, and other drama.

One could argue that opinionated discussion is what a forum is all about.. but what if the searcher doesn't want a forum post with a bunch of people ranting, and instead want a content page explaining what they actually searched for. When I personally search for anything, I get frustrated when I get directed to a message board and don't get my answer. :/

One of the forums I run uses Zoints SEO. And the results are unarguable. I definitely see a lot more guests and traffic coming to my website. But that's just it. Just guests. I would say that the SEO has helped build the community maybe a total of 10 or so contributing users, if that, within the past year.

I don't know, I mean.. traffic is always a good thing. But in my opinion it's by no means worth $100+ to get it on forum content. And most systems that you could use for your main site already have SEO and friendly urls built into them.

[EnIgMa1234]

It does many things. If a visitor see's something he/she likes on the site, he/she will most likely join.

As for adsense as I said above, the more visitors you have better change someone will click it. 100$ is nothing. Some sites make 100$+ a day. SEO is our friend not our enemy. If definatly speeds up registration.

[Ziki]

No.Not at all.No commercial products are needed though they are a big help but my definitive answer is NO

[Brandon Sheley]

It's helped me tremendously, Since I've added vbseo and tweaked it, my registrations have doubled per day

Just like LK said, vbseo will help removing 99% of your duplicate content.
I've been studying SEO for 3 years now, and I can tell when something works.

[Attilitus]

I'll chime in with my support for SEO.

vBSEO more than tripled my adsense revenue to amounts that I thought impossible for my small board.

[MRGTB]

Originally Posted by EnIgMa1234

What it does is give your a better ranking with search engines (search engine optimization).
If you were to search google for e.g football, many sites have that word but with SEO it narrows the choice down.

E.G showthread.php?t=50 -> football-play-t56.html

Which would give better results in google.

It just narrows down the results which will attract more visitors to your site. You then have a better change of those visitors clicking adsence.

Hope that helps

I don't agree with that myself, lets say a person has vBSEO installed and has a thread with 6 lines of text about football.

Now lets say another site has a thread with 50 lines of text about football, with the word football mentioned many more times in his thread, but he doesn't have vBSEO installed.

You could argue his thread will get better ranking because of the better content in that thread. Just because you have more friendly URL's using programs like vBSEO. Doesn't mean your always going to get a better rank on something, than another site without it installed. Quite a few things come into play. The domain name for starters can play a key part, Category title you create, they contain keywords for search engines to relate too, the amount of content on the forum that might mention football multiple times in various different threads. And so on, the list goes on and they all matter when combined together!

Lets take your site for example Loco.M

You run a site called: vBulletinsetup.com, great domain name with vbulletin in the title, you have lots of content about vbulletin also. And you have vBSEO installed.

Go in Google and see who gets listed first, your site or vBulletin.com. And they don't use vBSEO