SEO for forums

[annej]

My friend is building a forum and I'm helping with some SEO suggestions. I've always had regular webpages and have a pretty good feel for that but a forum has so many automated pages with set page title, description and keywords.

How is SEO for forums different? I have the impression that meta name, description and keywords should be unique for each page but what happens when the forum software just sets duplicate description and keywords for the entire forum?

[Renaud_Joly]

From my experience forums need topic organisation because they drive too much content and often off topic keywords dispersion (keywords that are not searched but used by members ). Optimised topics are strong landing pages but a lot of work for moderators.

[annej]

This forum has 5 0r 6 main topics and people message in those sections based on what they are talking about.

Would it make sense then to hand optimize the contents page of each of these categories? We could use key words in the title and description that would fit with the each topic.

The forum is from phpbb

[tedster]

Here's a thread from last year with some tips about phpbb forums and : [webmasterworld.com...] - it's not so much about titles, but more about limiting the duplicate URLs that a default install of phpbb creates.

[g1smd]

Note that vBulletin and others also have those same, and other, Duplicate Content issues.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 10:50 pm (utc) on Jun 13, 2010]
[edit reason] corrected typo [/edit]