SEO - Optimizing Forums for Search Engines

[ Bookmark this page! ] [ get HTML Version ]

Hot Niche Keywords
If you're interested in creating "niche sites" and want to see the top ten lists and top 50 lists that describe what people are interested in on the Internet check out these helpful web tools online.

Lycos 50 Daily Report: This site gives you the top 50 search terms as well as the top 50 sites that are being viewed for a 24 hour period This may give you some inspiration as to what types... Read internet business article



Black Hat SEO Companies
Since the dawn of the internet, seo and internet marketing has been a very powerful tool for business to reach a global audience. With the rising competition seo companies who have looked at gaining quick results opted for black hat seo techniques, but the big question remains:

Q. Are these Black Hat SEO Techniques here to last?
A. The Answer is No.

Technologies are ... Read internet business article



SEO - Optimizing Forums for Search Engines
Problems with optimizing forums and how to deal with it.

Usually forums are a difficult beast to optimize for Search Engines. Unlike other websites, you as the forum webmaster will face problems like lack of unique and useful content, inability to optimize keywords for certain pages, duplicate content problems and so on.

Difficult onpage optimization. Yes, if you have a website, you can simply do onpage optimization yourself, like bolding keywords, h1 and h2 tags with keywords and so on. But how to do that in a forum? A forum is about letting your users start a topic in a thread, but it's very unlikely they are going to bold keywords for you, they just post. Normal Onpage optimization, a effective tool for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), is sadly out of your hands.

So what's the solution?

Help generate interest in those threads where you know your users will post important keywords by replying or by adding more information. Even if they don't bold it, having a decent number of keywords in the thread will help Search Engine understand what your thread (and hence your page) is all about. You yourself can add keywords when you reply but please make it look natural. You can do the same for links and anchor text.

Content. Unlike websites or even blogs, forums usually don't have unique content. Your users will copy information from other sources and post them in your forum. Even if someone were to post original content, it may be short or incomplete enough to be effective for SEO.

Help me then.

Well, you can write your own articles and post them in your forum. Encourage your users to write articles and have them post in your forum. Have a contest or something. You can even start a controversial topic and this will definitely generate replies and hence content. What you need is user participation and input, without them, your forum doesn't stand a chance and most search engine will just ignore your forum due to the lack of unique content. However, you should concentrate on content which has the important keywords associated to them.

Supplemental Results. One of the biggest problem with forums is that a lot of pages tend to go into supplemental results. Why? Because the threads(pages) have very little information or content. And when it doesn't have much content in it, it looks exactly like another thread(page) with very little information. Your forum is usually dynamic and template driven, which means only the actual content is different, the rest of the forum remains the same. If you strip out all the tags, the menus, headers & footers is the same for all the pages. For example, there is a thread started by A Forumer, and he writes only a few lines: "I have found a cool site! link here! Check it out". And then there is another thread started by B Forumer, and he too writes a few lines: "Nice article! Link here! Good read!". So Googlebot comes and read your pages and due to the lack of content, they believe that these 2 threads are the same (due to your template) and may send one of them to Supplemental Results. I am pretty sure you have a lot of such posts in your forum, right?

What can you do?

Simple, if someone posts such a thread in your forum, just go into the link and extract some summary and paste it in the thread. For the above article example, goto the article itself and copy several lines into that thread. This way, there is additional content for Googlebot to index and gives you a less likelihood of going supplemental. Encourage more users to reply to the thread can help as well. You should also check all outgoing links your uses have posted and see whether these links lead to blacklisted sites. If they do, delete them off immediately.

You can also look for forum modification scripts which helps you change the meta descriptions of your threads so that it would look different from each other to Search Engines and reducing the risk of your pages going into supplemental.

There are some modifications scripts out there which can help your improve your forums' Search Engine friendliness by creating Search Engine friendly static URLs, or even keyword rich URLs through mod rewrite. In additon, see whether there are scripts which can help you create sitemaps for submission to Google to help them index your forum more efficiently.

Another effective way to improve your forum SE-friendliness is through archiving. Archiving means stripping everything out except the main content and important links. This way, Search Engine can easily and quickly crawl and index your forum without the rest of the rubbish cluttering it.

There are a lot of other ways to optimize your forum, too many for this article anyway. But you should follow some of the above tips (especially those tips which doesn't require additional coding skills) as they are pretty easy and they require only a minimal effort. Basically, they all have to do with adding content and keywords into your forum posts but still making it look natural.

Bookmark this page | Search this site | E-mail to a Friend



Why Outgoing Links Are Good

Convincing Search Engines what your site is about - outgoing (outbound) links

Yes, outgoing links to relevant (and keyword rich) sites can help you rank as well. Sure incoming (inbound) links are certainly overwhelmingly more important in getting you the rankings, but not many realize that outgoing (outbound) links help too. Why? Basically because the outgoing links tells the search engine what your site is linking to and thus what your site is about as well. How many food sites you know link to automobile sites?

Not convinced? Just pretend to be a search engine, maybe like Google. Your job as a search engine is to provide relevant information to your users. And to do that you have to figure out what a website is about so that you can rank it (and then display it) for some terms. So you send your little spiders to crawl and then index that website. Let's say you found a few keywords like "ice-cream", "deserts" and "drinks". But in all seriousness, how do you really know that this site is really about those things? Could they have been a spam site designed to trick you? Yup, you have to make sure they are legitimate and they are related to their keywords. So you check your database whether there are other sites linking to that particular site with the same keywords or something similar. You also check the link text (anchor text) on links to that particular site as well as see whether they have those keywords in them.

Huh? What? Wake up, boy! That's incoming links! Not outgoing links! Again, you are right. But from the importance of incoming links comes the importance (although less) of outgoing links.

Again, put yourself in the position of a search engine and you are figuring out whether this site is really a legitimate site and whether you should rank it for certain terms like "ice-cream", "deserts" and "drinks". And during your crawling of that site, you found several outgoing links. So being a good search engine, you crawled those links and discovered they too have the same or similar keywords in them. Hmm......how many spam sites do that - link to sites which has useful information for their visitors thereby driving traffic away from their site? Hey, I think we call those sites Search Engines!!

Spam sites or even "made for advertisement" sites want to keep their visitors or at least link to other spam sites. And if there are keywords in the anchor text? This is like helping the another site rank even better. Not very likely what a spam site would do, right? What will you as a search engine think?

Before I go any further convincing you that outgoing links are important, I will ask you a simple question. Which site you know have all the information you ever need? None. At the very least, some information is taken from some other sources, be it blogs, online news or press releases. Even educational institutes refers information from other education institutes. So how can a real legitimate site have no or very few outgoing links?

Simply, it just makes sense to have outgoing links. I would call them related sources of information. If you link to trusted sources, then search engines will believe that your site is relevant to the topic. And it is good for the users of the Internet on the whole. Of course there are a lot of SEO experts who disagree that outgoing links helps in ranking. But even if it doesn't, I believe it certainly helps your site's visitors.

No, I am not saying that outgoing links is the cure for low rankings in Search Engines. What I am saying is that outgoing links to related topics is a natural part of the Internet. And being natural is what search engines are all about, right? So don't be afraid to link to your sources when it is needed. It is extremely useful to your visitors as well. Just be careful who you link to.




Top rated articles for internet business

1. Bad Credit Home Loan To Get You Out Of Debt
A "bad credit home loan" can help you climb your way out of debt and get you started back on the road to upstanding, good credit. There are many lenders who are willing to make bad credit home loans t... Read article

2. SEO - Blogging vs Article Writing
With million of websites adding on to the already vast Internet, making a mark and gaining business through the medium is a magnanimous challenge. Though all websites that are launched do not sport an... Read internet business article

3. Making Money Online
Hello folks, this is "Seth Rubberfold", once again. This will be our next article in the mini series entitled "Making Money Online". In the previous updated versions, we went over so much, I hope you ... Read internet business article

4. To Boost Impulse Purchasing Using Online Marketing
Impulse purchases by consumers are a great way to increase the cash flow to your business. People get excited by good sales and marketing techniques and buy goods on impulse, boosting the profits of a... Read internet business article

5. SEO Myth of Myths
It comes as no surprise to me when day after day I see all the offers flying around about different methods of promoting a product, website or selling information on the Net. Everyone wants a piece of... Read internet business article

6. SEO Tips for Instant Results
People ask me on a daily basis how to do a couple of quick fixes which will make their site appear higher in the search results. The type of people that ask me are usually people who have been doing S... Read internet business article

7. Getting High Page Rank Sites To Link To Your Site
The biggest craze on the internet today is linking between sites. Many webmasters spend many long hours searching for links to their site. Searching for links is not so much fun, actually, it could tu... Read internet business article

8. Internet Marketing Guru
Firstly let me explain what a guru is. It is a name given to Internet marketers that have supposedly made a lot of money online, and have a group of loyal followers: their list. These are the people w... Read internet business article

9. Generating Traffic For List Building
Link building is an extremely popular method of gaining both traffic and search engine popularity. Search engine popularity can also increase traffic, if your website is listed in the top 10 or 20 nat... Read internet business article

10. Business Web Hosting
Just like any other service, when shopping for web hosting you will want to check out what you are getting before you decide what to do. When you make a big decision you weigh your choices to make sur... Read internet business article


Credit Counseling and Debt consolidation services in Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi,



SEO - Optimizing Forums for Search Engines
Debt consolidation services in Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania,

Debt consolidation services in Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Washington DC, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

Add website or submit URL link of your site to 1000 free directory