Forum search engine placement

How to get into the search engines?

[4css]

I run a medical (not sure if naming the type is permited?) and I would like to know how to work with it to get it into better position in the search engines.

It has been online for a few years, first under a snitz software, then phpbb, and now smf, which I love.

If anyone can refer me to some reading material on how to get this into a better position I would appreciate it. SEO is somethng tht is on my learning list next so I would love to learn how to do this, and I prefer reading on this stuff, not being told the answers as I feel that isn't the way to learn how to do it. ;)

If there are any good threads within here on how to position a forum, I would apreciate guidance to them. I have searched, but can't seem to find anything to help on this.

Thanks in advance
4~css!

[viggen]

Hello 4css,

Very important is to kill session ID`s, that way you make it possible to crawl your forum properly. You could also make the url search engine friendly (mod rewrite comes to my mind) but i assume there will be Mods for your search engine software to do just that.

Once you made sure that the engines can index your site without problems you can go and work on ranking...

cheers
viggen

[rogerd]

There are a couple of issues, 4css. First, is optimizing the site, i.e., creating off-site linkage, etc. Second is tuning up the forum content and internal linkage.

The major software packages tend to have hacks that offer a variety of SEO improvements in one package. I'm not sure about smf, but I'd start by looking for one of those.

If you opt to do it yourself, optimization isn't that much different than for any other kind of content - good internal linkage, proper titles and page headings, and minimization of non-content text and code.

As viggen notes, getting rid of session IDs is important. I'd add,

2. Don't index duplicate or useless content. Often, forums have multiple ways to reach the same content (e.g., different query strings that produce the same result, links for individual posts, etc.). Eliminate as much of this as possible with any or all of the following approaches - edit the code to avoid redundancy, disallow things like memberlist pages in robots.txt, add the 'nofollow' attribute to links leading to dupe/useless pages, etc.

[linear]

A couple SMF tips for you:

Enabling search-engine-friendly URLs is an option in the admin area. Eanble these with confidence--it doesn't break old-style links in the process.

To rogerd's point labeled 2 above, one entry in robots.txt can keep bots off SMF's non-content pages (pretty much everything but posts and forum indexes):

User-agent: *
Disallow: /index.php?action=

[4css]

Thanks for the replies, they are both very interesting, and yes rogerd, I do prefer to do things myself ;) Suppose that sounds a bit stubborn, but that is how I learn things. By doing.

session IDs, I think someone from another forum sent me information regarding this once in a pm, I'm going to have to go back and look to see what it was. Not something I understand about, yet.

I'll be taking notes on what you both answered with, and thanks bunches. I'm sure I'll have more questions once I go over your posts again.