Free SEO Articles

I am sure you’ve tried it! I know I have, and I wouldn’t be surprised if my neighbour’s cat has, at some point in one of its 9 lives, even attempted it. Yes, folks, what I am talking about is starting an Internet forum. There are almost as many Internet forums as there are Internet users, but despite this apparent glut of competitors, how can you improve your site’s SE profile and try to gain an edge over your competitors in terms of SEO?

I have used vBulletin, SMF, phpbb, punbb and mybb in the past and after significant use of each, I have decided to standardize my forum building efforts on myBB. To me, it is straightforward and intuitive to manage and customize, has a reasonable range of, and support for, plug-ins and themes, and the free support community always do their best to help out (even if in a markedly high school-ish way at times.)

So I want to talk a little about ways in which we can improve onsite SEO for myBB forums.

There are several useful plug-ins that help with myBB SEO. The first, and most obvious, is the Google SEO mod which incorporates suggestions from Google’s own Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. The mod requires a little effort to get working flawlessly, but all credit to the author for including several SEO features in to a single mod. This plug-in will enable keyword-rich search-engine friendly URLs, dynamic XML sitemaps, canonical URLs, dynamic META tags generation, automatic 301 redirects for broken URLS and a few smaller tweaks.

In order to avoid PR leakage (and to deter forum spammers), it is a good idea to install an additional plug-in that appends the rel=nofollow attribute to all in post links.

Similar to the above, any extraneous links included in your myBB templates should be amended to rel=nofollow links. Again, this will help prevent PR leakage. You can also use a robots.txt file to prevent search engine spiders unnecessarily visiting and subsequently indexing pages that should not appear in the index – these may include your login page, standard help files, member list and more.

Signatures are always of some concern to forum owners. I tend to tackle this by introducing a clear statement about when signatures are allowed. I use a plug-in to disable signature by default. In order to qualify for a  standard signature, a user must make 10 good posts. The standard signature has rel=nofollow appended to all outbound links. When a user has made 25 or more good posts, I remove the rel=nofollow restriction on his/her signature links. Employing this method has allowed me to gain and retain good PR and ranking on many inner pages. There are several signature related plug-ins for myBB. The one I use at the moment is available at myBB Central.

Here, I have tried to provide a broad overview of some of the ways in which to raise the SEO profile of a myBB forum. I will make additional posts on this topic, delving in to more detail on each of the broad points mentioned above.

Internal linking refers to the method of linking from one page or post on your site or blog to another page or post on your site or blog.

Since search engine spiders may follow outbound links on your popular or frequently indexed pages, then it is a good idea to give the spiders plenty of your own internal links to follow. This may increase the number of pages from your site that are read, and consequently indexed, by the search engines. It may also disseminate PageRank within your site.

As blog owners, what options do we have to increase our internal linking?

Post Plug-in Library

One method is to use the series of plug-ins developed by Rob Marsh, namely the Post-Plugin Library and its related plug-ins: Similar Posts, Recent Posts, Random Posts, Popular Posts, and Recent Comments. These can all be found at the main WordPress site, or at Rob’s site. The main WordPress site also lists a series of similar plug-ins which do the same job. For the most part, I have standardized my blogs on Rob’s plug-ins because they offer everything I need and provide a consistent means of managing the several plug-ins (using 5 plug-ins from one author, instead of one plug-in each from 5 different authors.)

Once you have a reasonable head of content on your blog, these plug-ins can be used either as widgets, or by inserting them in to pages or posts, to provide on page links to other posts on your blog. This gives the aforementioned search engine spiders plenty of local content to chomp on, but also – perhaps more importantly – brings before the eyes of readers additional content they may be interested in seeing.

These plug-ins can be used in numerous configurations, either individually, or in combination. Experimentation will allow you to build the best profile for your particular circumstances.

Manual Internal Linking

Another method to increase the internal linking from individual posts is to manually link to previous posts. For example, if you have a past article on blue widgets and you make mention of blue widgets in a newer article then be sure to link back to your previous article when first mentioning blue widgets in the newer article.

A popular method that embraces this technique and takes it one step further by using older articles as the basis for present material. This way, you can start out your new article with an opener such as: “Regular readers may recall my previous article in which I discussed blue widgets. In today’s post I will be looking at blue widgets in a little more detail…”

Automated Internal Linking

A natural extension of manual internal linking, is automated internal linking. Fortunately for blog owners, Vladimir Prelovac has created a plug-in to allow the association of links (both external and internal) to a word or phrase, and more. The plug-in is called SEO Smart Links and is available from the main WordPress plug-in directory of from Mr. Prevolac’s excellent site.

Once installed, the settings allow you to configure a series of words or phrases each with a corresponding link. Each time the word or phrase is parsed by WordPress, a link to your specified target is automatically inserted.

This plug-in is extremely useful, particularly if you already have a large body of content on your site.

One aspect you should bear in mind when using this plugin is that, depending on the number of links you configure, it can impose a non-trivial overhead on your site.

One aspect of onsite SEO for blogs is to configure a desirable permalink structure.  Essentially, a permalink is a permanent reference url used for access once the post passes from the first page of your blog.  It is what others will use to link to the post and, perhaps more importantly, the link the search engines will use to identify your post, page or article.  Permalinks should be unique.

There has always been debate about whether, and the extent to which, keyword-rich urls contribute to a pages.  It is commonly believed that keywords in the permalink do indeed contribute to a page’s SERPs.

The structure of WordPress permalinks is dictated by a series of settings and parameters found under the Settings -> Permalinks section, within the administrator console. 

In order to fully optimise the permalink structure, aim to use your tagret keywords in the leftmost position of the url.  In order to do this you’d need a custom structure containing the single parameter /%postname%.  This creates a permalink based on the post title.  It is then up to you  to choose a unique, keyword-rich and compelling title for each of your posts.

Be aware that using just the /%postname% parameter compels you to create unique titles for every post on your blog in order to avoid collisions (where two articles might have the same permalink, clearly not a good situation).

Also, be aware that if your blog is established with numerous indexed pages then your should avoid altering your permalink structure without a full understanding of the consequences.  It will affect your backlinks, trackbacks and ultimately your SERPs.  Usually, optimising a blog’s permalink structure should be undertaken during the early stages of the blog’s development, and before  a substantial content base is developed.

There are several plug-ins available that allow auto-manipulation of post slugs and consequently permalinks.  These often remove “noise” words (such as “the”, “and” and alike) with the belief that increasing the overall keyword density of the permalink, and shifting the keywords leftward, will ultimately increase the link weight.  Although these plug-ins might offer some small SEO benefit, be extra cautious when using these on active blogs for the same reasons stated above.

Later iterations of WordPress offer the facilty to edit the permalink before publishing in a box just beneath the post title when writing it.  This way you can manually create a permalink for the post or manually crop noise words prior to publishing.

SEO activity can be divided in to two broad categories, namely, offsite SEO and onsite SEO. 

Onsite SEO refers to all the methods used in the design and presentation of your site in order to enhance its appeal to search engines and spiderability.  Onsite SEO includes tweaking hundreds of factors that can increase the quality of information search engines retrieve when visiting your site.  There are no magic formulae for these elements, but using them all appropriately can lead to significant gains in search engine rankings.  Onsite SEO factors include (but are not limited to):

• choice of text within HTML h# tags (for example, <h1> or <h3> tags).  Do not overuse h1 tags, one per page;
• choice of text within HTML title tags.  This should be unique for each page on your site;
• keyword density within HTML body tags.  Historically (and, perhaps, anecdotally), a density of 3% to 5% evenly distributed on pages of over 200 words was thought to be near optimal, although this is near impossible to assess objectively;
• strong relevant internal linking.  Breadcrumb style sub-navigation on pages can strengthen internal linking;
• choice of text within HTML META description tag.  This should be unique for each page on your site;
• watch out for broken links within your site;
• keywords in HTML <strong> tags;
• use an up-to-date XML sitemap;
• use an up-to-date HTML sitemap;
• place target keywords high up on the page;
• customize 404 pages to include links back to principal areas of your site’s navigation structure;
• use unique and relevant HTML ALT tags on all images;

These are several of the more important factors that influcence onsite SEO, many of which we shall return to in more depth in ensuing articles on this blog.

Offsite SEO refers to the methods employed to improve search engine rankings by maximizing the influence of factors outside your site’s home domain.  For example, building strong, relevant inbound links from other domains/sites.  The principal object of offsite SEO is quality link building.  Link building has evolved to become a full and separate discipline within SEO and we will return on more than one occasion to tackle the many aspects of link building in future articles on this blog.

Ordinarily, onsite SEO should be undertaken before proceeding to offsite SEO efforts and are usually quicker and easier to perform.  Offsite SEO efforts are usually divided in to mid- to long-term projects.