Hi guys!
I created my forum about 2 weeks ago, and it's doing OK (50 members so far):
http://www.passerlapaces.fr/forum
But I would like to ask you some advices to optimize the settings of the forum for SEO.
I'm not really a SEO expert, so any advice would be great, but:
MyBB Version: 1.6.11
PHP Version: 5.4.23
SQL: MySQLi 5.1.72
Thanks
Quality Content is the king, provide high value quality content as posts in your forum niche, everything else will follow...
Learn what SEO (search engine optimization) is and you will know how to get it done
The reason why your forum appears in "unexpected" way in Google is because you don't have a meta description. That's not necessarily a problem, you can let Google identify the most important elements of your page (they get it right 99% of the time). If you don't like the description and you'd like to use a custom one, you can make use of the meta description tag:
Quote: <meta name="description" content="Make it short and simple so that those who search for you know what your site is about right away">
Enabling search engine friendly URLs is a good idea. Back when keyword tags had more importance you could install an automatic keyword generator plug-in, but that's really an overkill and could do more harm than good.
My advice is to ignore what self-proclaimed "SEO GURUS" tell you in their fancy "Get to the first page within an hour" articles, they are either outdated or try to sell you their service. The one time I fell for one of these I not only lost a lot of money but also my ranking. A few facts so that you can start your research from there:
- Content is the king. Period.
- Links are getting less and less attention. Don't spam them or Google will bite you.
- Keep your site clean, even websites like Mozzilla were punished for spam
- Let your site rank naturally - that won't happen overnight
- Your site will be in Google sandbox, which means that in the first 6 months you can hardly rank for competitive keywords. Take this time to grow your community and have quality content.
- Remember that your forum is for entertaining and educating, not for search engines.
(2014-01-09, 04:22 PM)techlib Wrote: [ -> ]Quality Content is the king, provide high value quality content as posts in your forum niche, everything else will follow...
Ok, I'll work on writing nice posts
Thanks guys for your answers, but my question was:
Am I doing something wring with On-Site SEO ?
Good news today: my forum is on page 1 for a keyword I wanted to rank for
(2014-01-10, 12:24 AM)SentoWeb Wrote: [ -> ]The reason why your forum appears in "unexpected" way in Google is because you don't have a meta description. That's not necessarily a problem, you can let Google identify the most important elements of your page (they get it right 99% of the time). If you don't like the description and you'd like to use a custom one, you can make use of the meta description tag:
Quote: <meta name="description" content="Make it short and simple so that those who search for you know what your site is about right away">
Enabling search engine friendly URLs is a good idea. Back when keyword tags had more importance you could install an automatic keyword generator plug-in, but that's really an overkill and could do more harm than good.
My advice is to ignore what self-proclaimed "SEO GURUS" tell you in their fancy "Get to the first page within an hour" articles, they are either outdated or try to sell you their service. The one time I fell for one of these I not only lost a lot of money but also my ranking. A few facts so that you can start your research from there:
- Content is the king. Period.
- Links are getting less and less attention. Don't spam them or Google will bite you.
- Keep your site clean, even websites like Mozzilla were punished for spam
- Let your site rank naturally - that won't happen overnight
- Your site will be in Google sandbox, which means that in the first 6 months you can hardly rank for competitive keywords. Take this time to grow your community and have quality content.
- Remember that your forum is for entertaining and educating, not for search engines.
Thanks for your detailed description
Is it in the Administration panel that I can set my description ?
Focus all your attention on "on-page optimization" don't worry about "off-page optimization" at this stage!
Good Luck