I've been reading many forums and opinions on SEO for PHPBB. Some say it's helpful to have man-readable url's.
Others say it doesn't matter. Some have said switch to VB or some other bb software. I'd rather not since I'm comfortable with phpbb.
I understand user posts add the content, but is there anything else I can do to boost my SEO to REALLY help with the SE's ranking?
Looking at your site, you really haven't got a lot and you have made the classic rookie mistake of making too many forums when there's nothing to go in them. 50% of your forums are empty. If you can't think of something to write in them then your members won't be able to either. Cut it down to 6-8 forums in total, max. You only need more specific sections when you get enough posts on that subject to warrant a new forum dedicated to it. 1 forum with 100 posts looks better than 100 forums with 1 post each.
For example, you have 8 forums on long guns and hand guns with a total of 5 posts. Just have one forum on each, or maybe even one forum called long and handguns and then if you get a lot of posts on handguns, make a new forum for that. In fact you have Sixteen forums on guns and only 25 posts in them. Cut it all down. Be ruthless. It'll be better in the long run.
Making the site look busier with fewer forums will help your site develop much more than any SEO will.
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KevC wrote: ↑Thu Oct 19, 2017 7:07 pm
Honestly content is the biggest thing.
Looking at your site, you really haven't got a lot and you have made the classic rookie mistake of making too many forums when there's nothing to go in them. 50% of your forums are empty. If you can't think of something to write in them then your members won't be able to either. Cut it down to 6-8 forums in total, max. You only need more specific sections when you get enough posts on that subject to warrant a new forum dedicated to it. 1 forum with 100 posts looks better than 100 forums with 1 post each.
For example, you have 8 forums on long guns and hand guns with a total of 5 posts. Just have one forum on each, or maybe even one forum called long and handguns and then if you get a lot of posts on handguns, make a new forum for that. In fact you have Sixteen forums on guns and only 25 posts in them. Cut it all down. Be ruthless. It'll be better in the long run.
Making the site look busier with fewer forums will help your site develop much more than any SEO will.
KevC, Thanks for the advice. I condensed my board considerably. Moved topics/posts and changed permissions on existing forums I will later open to users/guests. I'd appreciate your input on how it looks now. Thanks! BTW...no SEO modifications necessary?
Much better. You could even cut the classifieds down to one forum. Buy/Sell. That's all you need at the moment.
SEO is a very subjective and thorny subject. I've never done any and it hasn't harmed me at all. If there was a magic list of things you can do to be number 1, everyone would do it and you can't all be number 1. If you have good content and you have your site linked at the right places where members are likely to hang out then you'll pick people up. It's much more dependent on the subject, content and whether there are already highly successful boards on the same subject knocking about.
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SEO being what it is - does it make sense to use a SEO extension that allows users to optionally add their own topic meta keywords/tags to their posts to increase matching content?
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