To SEO or not to SEO

Rotsblok · Post by **Rotsblok** » Tue Dec 18, 2007 9:23 pm

Why does someone needs SEO, yes your users demand it etc blablabla.

Does it really help the search engines? Why if everybody loves SEO and is trying to make the best SEO out there is it that the biggest search engine doesn't even have SEO used on his urls,,,,,
as you can find this url not very SEO friendly
http://www.google.nl/search?q=phpbb3&ie ... =firefox-a

So my question and opinion is that SEO is overrated and rather useless...or am i wrong...,

ssslippy · Post by **ssslippy** » Wed Dec 19, 2007 3:56 pm

Actually google has a seperate search engine algorythim(sp?) for forums. In all honesty you dont need SEO url's anymore. All the major search engines can handle forum url's now. The best thing you can do is make sure you put your content before your menu's via divs. Put the proper <h1><h2> tags in the right places.

I am not going to go through everything for SEO but you should google it up and see whats out there for how to make a page properlly seo friendly.

I enjoy the pretty url's on my forums cause they are pretty and that is the only reason i use them.

Sylver Cheetah 53 · Post by **Sylver Cheetah 53** » Fri Dec 21, 2007 2:04 pm

What is SEO? Search Engines... What O stands for?

Post by **KevC** » Fri Dec 21, 2007 2:24 pm

Search Engine Optimisation.

It's something I've never done and it seems to make no difference to my sites.

I have a meta description and that's it. Googling for one specific subject word and 'forum' and I come out 2nd on google with my main site. I have no idea what my page rank is. I'm not too bothered. I have the site cos I like it and if people want to visit, they'll find it.

I guess it's more important if you're selling something or providing information.

Sylver Cheetah 53 · Post by **Sylver Cheetah 53** » Fri Dec 21, 2007 2:30 pm

So how can we do this optimisation?

Tripp · Post by **Tripp** » Sat Dec 22, 2007 12:38 am

Search Google or check some mods in development section for phpBB 3

Tom@S · Post by **Tom@S** » Sat Dec 22, 2007 12:44 pm

seo mod help but not a lot.On forum you cant much to do whit seo because it is a CMS but you can do some backlinks whit keywords. Another is in sites, there is lot of to do-h tags, domain name, good and original content, some bolds, backlink again etc etc it is not very easy and it take some time to understand how is it work and how to help to you site/bussines

Double_J · Post by **Double_J** » Mon Dec 24, 2007 5:36 pm

In response to the url thing here, I think it is usefull to keep the url structure in, not for SEO but for usability.
Imo
url.com/pageengine.php?content=1
is much harder to remember then something like:
url.com/page_name
So if you look for something on a site you can also then use the urls to find something. on blogs I use this mostly to quickly access archives -> url.com/2007/12/

ssslippy wrote:Actually google has a seperate search engine algorythim(sp?) for forums. In all honesty you dont need SEO url's anymore. All the major search engines can handle forum url's now. The best thing you can do is make sure you put your content before your menu's via divs. Put the proper <h1><h2> tags in the right places.

I am not going to go through everything for SEO but you should google it up and see whats out there for how to make a page properlly seo friendly.

I enjoy the pretty url's on my forums cause they are pretty and that is the only reason i use them.

Sylver Cheetah 53 · Post by **Sylver Cheetah 53** » Tue Dec 25, 2007 7:55 pm

Drugs wrote:Search Google or check some mods in development section for phpBB 3

I hate phpBB 3!

Tom@S wrote:seo mod help but not a lot.On forum you cant much to do whit seo because it is a CMS but you can do some backlinks whit keywords. Another is in sites, there is lot of to do-h tags, domain name, good and original content, some bolds, backlink again etc etc it is not very easy and it take some time to understand how is it work and how to help to you site/bussines

What seo mod? I'm using Google Pooler and Meta Tags. There are any other seo mods?

Jim_UK · Post by **Jim_UK** » Tue Dec 25, 2007 8:08 pm

Sylver Cheetah 53 wrote: What seo mod? I'm using Google Pooler and Meta Tags. There are any other seo mods?

This is General Discussion and not for Mod Requests. We have a forum specifically for that.

Jim

Sylver Cheetah 53 · Post by **Sylver Cheetah 53** » Tue Dec 25, 2007 8:11 pm

Okay, man. I've made a new topic like you said.

ameeck · Post by **ameeck** » Wed Dec 26, 2007 8:33 am

SEO isn't just about URL rewriting, it's actually about everything else but this. You can make descriptive URL's like that without using mod_rewrite, and even if you do, it does more or less affect better acessibility and overview for users.

Things like meta tags, especially keywords and description don't work too much nowadays, at least not the first one. They've been widely abused for building up PR on spam sites and search indexeres don't regard them much.

What does count are natural backlinks to your site, logically, the more your popular site is(<= links from other sites), the more attention it gets from crawlers. Another key thing is the coding of the page, styles written in clean XHTML+external CSS tend to get their content indexed better and have better search results on more specific search queries. It's also positive to have the document structured properly(h1->h2->h3, paragraphs) and use titles which people will probably search for.

A good example for the last argument might be my experience with how search indexeres manage titles: I run a localized phpBB support board and we have a section for tutorials, we had one named "How to install phpBB", which was getting miserable traffic, most of it direct from the site. After changing the title to "phpBB installation" the traffic from search engines was many times larger and the page was getting many PV's compared to what it had before. I don't see this as some SEO magic for which I would pay hundreds of dollars, I think SEO stands on these small details, which raise the noticability and usability of your whole site.

vistapages · Post by **vistapages** » Wed Dec 26, 2007 4:32 pm

Rotsblok wrote:So my question and opinion is that SEO is overrated and rather useless...or am i wrong...,

Search engines are the primary way people find out about services. SEO is not overrated, it's difficult! It's a must do if you want traffic, organicly

Techie-Micheal · Post by **Techie-Micheal** » Wed Dec 26, 2007 5:54 pm

ameeck wrote:SEO isn't just about URL rewriting, it's actually about everything else but this. You can make descriptive URL's like that without using mod_rewrite, and even if you do, it does more or less affect better acessibility and overview for users.

I'm sorry, but I have to do this. The word is effect, meaning to cause.

Now that that is out of the way.

I've said this before, but I'll say it again. I agree to a certain extent about using techniques to make it easier for your users (which will usually result in making it easier for search engines), but if I cater to search engines first, my users will most likely not want to stay on my site for very long. And isn't that the ultimate goal of any website? To have visitors stay and return? I've been to sites that have 1 page on the entire site. It is long, bunch of highlighted text telling me how the product is this and that, then a bunch of poisoning keywords at the bottom of the page. I feel dirty after visiting those so-called SEO'ed sites. I don't want to return, nevermind buy whatever they are selling.They just lost a potential customer.

My take on it is don't concentrate on SEO, and instead build your site for your users. Sure, use friendly URLs if you want, but don't go overboard with them. I actually find it easier to remember a site that has a URI of article.php?aid=12345432 instead of article/this_is_some_really_long_page_title_that_annoys_me. I'm not saying I'll remember the exact page, but I'm more likely to remember the name of the site.

eUKhost.com · Post by **eUKhost.com** » Tue Jan 01, 2008 9:25 pm

I would say it should be a proper combination of both the optimization techniques as well as proper information and content on page. The page should contain useful information for the visitors to come back and not just be heavily optimized to rank well for top keywords which won't help the purpose of the website.

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