Most of the SEO information available on the web relates to optimizing your website - and most of it says the same thing. Is there any difference between optimizing a website, and optimizing a forum specifically?

There is no easy answer to this question. Or, better yet, the easy answer is "yes and no".

The same "rules" apply. You should be following the same guidelines to optimize your forum as you would your main site - luckily, Community SEO for IPB makes this easy. However, here are a few general tips as to things that can improve your search engine visibility, specifically outlining things you can do to or for your forum.

• Choose an appropriate name for your site. This is probably the easiest, and hardest thing to do. You should ensure your domain name is related to your site. Sure "zomgdisiz1337.com" sounds great, but who is really going to search google for a term like that? Your domain name should be concise, and specific, to your site's theme. The "name" of your site should be related to your site's theme as well (if you can match the two, that's even better). Example:
  
  Domain: communityseo.com
  Page Title: CommunitySEO
  
  You configure your page title in IPB in the admin CP under Tools and Settings -> General Configuration -> Board Name
  
• Ensure user-submitted links have the rel="nofollow" attribute applied to them. CommunitySEO provides an easy way to do this automatically for all of your outbound links, while not setting this flag for your internal links, however if you must resort to making a manual modification to your site, in IPB 2.2.x open sources/classes/bbcode/class_bbcode_core.php and find
  

  return ( isset($url['st']) ? $url['st'] : '' ) . "<a href=\"".$url['html']."\" target=\"_blank\">".$show."</a>" . $url['end'];

  
  and change this to
  

  return ( isset($url['st']) ? $url['st'] : '' ) . "<a href=\"".$url['html']."\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">".$show."</a>" . $url['end'];

  
  This will tell spiders you cannot vouch for the link, and that you don't want your ranking affected by it. It will still be followed, but it won't affect you.
  
  This is especially important in an environment where users can submit content to your site, i.e. a forum or blog.
  
• Be careful which skin you use. Some skins are nice and flashy and all - but are they accessible? What happens when you disable javascript? How does it look as a guest? You should visit your site as a guest, as a member, and as a bot to ensure that everyone sees what you want them to see. IPB provides a way to force bots to use a particular skin - this can be used to your advantage by creating a special spider skin (provided automatically with CommunitySEO for IPB) that uses much less javascript, and uses important h# tags in the skin, and then forcing bots to use this skin.
  
  My only recommendation is that if you force bots to use a particular skin, you allow your members to use it as well. Most won't - however if you allow it as a choice, then you would not fall under general "cloaking" definitions, but rather defaulting an available skin, since the bot cannot obviously make it's own choice.
  
• Ensure your site is not too general. Too often I see a new "my site is about everything" site pop up. What's the point? If it's just a forum for a few friends to chat, then you probably don't even need to or want to worry about SEO. But if you care about your site becoming big and popular, make sure it has a definitive theme - and when possible try to dig into your market niche firmly. If your site is too broad member's will not feel a purpose in coming back, your site will not grow, and thus your search engine positioning will stall proportionately.
  
• If you use any modifications, make sure you know what they do! I've seen some modifications that work fine when you are logged in - but then you view a cached page of your site in google only to see an SQL or PHP error. Visit your site as a bot, especially when modifications are involved, to ensure they do not have any negative consequences you aren't aware of.
  
• Use links properly. It's great to write up a 1000 word post on a specific subject. Content is key in search engine positioning! In fact, the more valuable, unique, and targeted content you can get on your site the better! Have guest speakers post if possible. Invite important users to come share a piece of their mind. Get the content and discussions flowing. Just make sure that the content is properly interlinked and connected. If a topic is related to another topic, link the two, and be sure to do so using appropriate anchor text. Don't just link a "click here" sentence - type out what you are viewing. "Click here" linked to some related page is not NEARLY as beneficial as "Find out more about product xyz" linked to that same page. Use links properly - use them how they were designed to be used.
  
• Set meta description and keyword tags. While these don't actually help your search engine positioning, they're still good practice to set. They can help provide hints to search engines, and can help search engines to determine what to display for your site when showing the result in a search engine result listing. Don't skip this step just because the benefit is marginal. Be complete.
  
• If possible, use a friendly URL modification. It is extremely important, however, to ensure that any FURL modification you use does NOT cause, and does NOT allow, duplicate content. Many friendly URL modifications simply rewrite the urls from the page, and do not validate the data - they let the htaccess send the user to the appropriate page. While this is a start, it can cause you more harm than good, especially if people are out to get you and take your site down. Setting up 100 different links to the same page on your site will spread all the page rank across those pages, and will cause the search engines to see your site as containing duplicate content, which is a big no no. Research any FURL modifications thoroughly. CommunitySEO has been extensively tested for it's FURL capabilities, and will not cause any harm or allow any duplicate content, via it's rewriting and URL checking capabilities.

As with any search engine optimization campaign, the key is content. Another top priority should be quality and related inbound links. I would discourage against paying for such links (outside of general advertising, which is fine) however if you aren't linked to by anyone, spiders have a much harder time finding your site, and see your site as much less important than if you ARE linked to.

A great way to "get linked" is provided in most forum software already! Put a link to your site *(again, with accurate and correct anchor text) in your signature on other sites you visit. If the forum software provides a "location" or "bio" section (IPB provides both) make sure that your link is there too. When you post on your favorite sites, you'll automatically get backlinks to your own site! And what's even better is if those sites are big and rank well in search engines, you get positive backlinks with good ratings.


Always be honest about your SEO campaigns. Do not do anything you wouldn't want done to you, especially on other people's sites. Don't try to stuff unrelated keywords into hidden text - not only does this aggrevate users who search for those keywords and end up on your unrelated site, it can get you banned entirely from most major search engines. Drive content and traffic, and the search engine rankings will shortly follow.