The single most important and widely accepted area of improvement in search engine optimization is content - if your site doesn't have the content to back up it's structure, it does not matter how much SEO efforts you put in - the search engines simply won't care. It doesn't matter if you've discovered every meta tag under the sun that Google reads and parses - if you don't have any relevant content on your site, there's no reason to return your site as a result to a search query.

Thus, the most important area to concentrate on is content. This involves many things, and is not a direct area that someone can tell you to change. Instead, it's more of a general concept to always keep in mind. Let's use an example.

In this example you are running a forum about "mustang auto parts", and you post a news topic for your members. Your news is automatically syndicated to your portal page or home page (this is a relatively common setup).

Many forum owners will post topics about site downtime, and new "features" of the site in their news areas. This is great and all - and surely your members do want to know this information. However, how relevant is this information exactly when someone does a search for "93 mustang alternator"? The homepage is the single most important page of your site - this is the first page that both search engines and human visitors see (typically) and as such it needs to be extremely relevant to your site's theme, it needs to capture the visitor's attention, and it needs to be easy to navigate and understand. This is a delicate balancing act, but it is not as difficult as it may seem.

In our example above, one thing we can do to improve our homepage content is to pull topics from a "Market place" forum (if one exists) or something similar to the home page. If one of your members has posted a "93 mustang alternator" for sale and it's listed on your homepage, instantly your site now becomes directly relevant to the search the visitor just performed. Instead of Google seeing "We now have blogs" when it visits, it sees "93 mustang alternator" and "mustang tailpipe" and so on - all very relevant keywords and topics for Google to look at on your site.

You may not want user submitted posts to be displayed as if they were important news topics on your site, and this is understandable. A simple listing would be sufficient - perhaps a "latest topics" listing with 20 of the latest topics linked. Make sure you don't just pull any topics however. You want to pull topics that are directly relevant to your site so be sure to control which are displayed on your front page.

Let's go back to the news area now. If you don't want to show your "We now have blogs" or "Site updated, sorry for the downtime" topics on your home page (which, let's face it, aren't going to put you up any higher in the search engine result listings for queries that your site SHOULD come up for) what do you do?

Well, one good idea is to syndicate how-to or "FAQ" type topics to your home page instead. This content doesn't necessarily need to change frequently. In fact, search engines prefer pages that don't change (they like to know that whatever they suggest to a user is what they saw in the first place). If you have instead of your site news topics, topics like "How to change the rear brakes on a 2000 Mustang" and "Great resource for used mustang parts" are being pulled, both search engine bots and human visitors will find directly relevant content linked to right from the front page. If you have a little preview of the topic being displayed as well, that's even better, because you've just increased the relevant keyword text associated with the topic links.


This isn't an exact science - it's next to impossible for someone to say "this topic on your homepage is good, but this one is bad". At the end of the day, it's up to you, the admin, to decide what you want to show visitors right away. But the more relevant the content is to your site, the better. And don't forget layout and accessibility, in addition to the standard SEO rhetoric (page title relevancy, meta tags, internal vs external linking, and so on) either - it all comes together to determine how relevant your site is seen by the search engine spiders.


This topic will likely evolve, with new specific information, concepts, suggestions, and ideas over time. The above is a generalization for webmasters to keep in mind while configuring their home pages for the first time (or reconfiguring their home pages), with respect to search engine optimization.