IP.Board and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Search engine optimisation for IP.Board (IPB) has been coming up a lot at the Invision Power Services forums lately. Unfortunately, as SEO is such an involved and complex subject, but also one that every web developer believes they can authoritatively discuss, a lot of misinformation is passed around in these topics and new users end up with a highly skewed view on what they should be doing. Whilst I’m not an SEO expert by any means, I do work for a search marketing agency, so I thought I’d write a bit of a primer for those setting up new forums, or those wishing to better promote their existing forum.

I’d like to start out with some key points:

• It’s all about the content.
• Changing your Meta keywords and description tags alone is not SEO, merely a contributing change.
• Friendly URLs alone are not SEO, nor are they “SEO URLs”. Even a perfect friendly URL won’t help you at all, unless you get the rest right.
• The PageRank score you see in Google’s toolbar does not correlate with your ranking for any given keyword, so don’t worry about it.
• Forums are great for search by their very nature, you shouldn’t need to sweat the details.

I’ve split the remainder of this article into two distinct parts. “On your site”, and “elsewhere”. On your site will help you with what you can do to set up the site itself. Elsewhere will talk about what else you could or should do.

What you should do on your site

The great thing about forums is that they’re naturally filled with content. Infact, they’re all about the content – everything else is secondary. If you’re using your forum for any other purpose (such as primarily using it as a revenue stream, or a “social network”), you may want to think about why it is that you’re using a forum. When you set up a forum, it should be about something you (or your company) know and love, as you’ll be key to getting the initial content in place.

This is great, as search engines love content. Another great side effect to having a lot of content related to your chosen subject is that the search engines will begin to see you as an authority on that subject, especially as people start to link to you. Additionally, they’ll pick up all of the different keywords you and your members have included in your posts, and you may start to rank for them – so if you have a forum about farming, for example, you may start to see it appearing in searches for ‘cattle’, ‘tractor’, or ’sheep shearing’, just because your members have mentioned them. Whilst it’s not a forum, my blog is a great example – I’m currently ranking very well for searches related to the X Factor and the UK’s Christmas Number One, along with the Evans Halshaw car company. I didn’t do this by worrying about URLs, link exchanges, or my PageRank – just about writing (arguably) good content.

Some changes you can make, however:

• Friendly URLs: Whether you’re setting up a new forum, or you’ve upgraded your existing forum to IP.Board 3, i’d definitely recommend enabling the built in friendly URLs feature. Make sure you have all the redirection settings enabled, and use “301″ (permanent) redirection, and make sure you’re using the Apache mod_rewrite option. Whilst this isn’t going to affect your rankings much, it does help users recognise what they’re going to see, and the search engines will start finding relevant keywords in your URLs.
• Skins: If you’re going to use a custom skin for IP.Board (which I’d definitely recommend), make sure the HTML for it is well written. Your forum and topic titles should be in the <h1> tag, you should include the meta description tag that’s present in the default skin. If you want to take it a step further, you or your designer could look at making sure that the forum content (The topic you’re viewing, the forum listing, etc.) appears above the header and navigation in the markup – this ensures that it’s the first thing search engines find in your page, and can be achieved with some simple CSS changes.
• Sitemap: Get yourself a sitemap plugin. There are a bunch of them available, some likely much better than others. This will generate an XML file that you can submit to search engines to help them to crawl your content more easily.
• Robots.txt: IP.Board ships with a simple robots file, named robotstxt.txt. As soon as you upload the board, rename this to robots.txt and it’ll help to exclude some pages on the forums that search engine spiders should not index. This includes things such as your admin directory, cache directory, user control panel and redirect pages.
• Categorisation: Whilst this is arguably not SEO, make sure that you have only the number of forums that you require, don’t create categories and forums and sub-forums for every potential discussion grouping. Strong categorisation of content will make your user’s lives easier, and will, in the long run, help the search engines to understand the structure your site better. It’ll make things such as Google’s new breadcrumb trail recognition better, along with increasing potential for getting site-links generated by the engine.
• External integration: Depending on the type of content your forum will contain, consider adding “Tweet This”, “Digg This”, “Bookmark this”, type social links to the first post of every topic. This is a great way to get some attention for your content. Additionally, as long as it is appropriate, make sure you enable OpenID and Facebook connect log ins. Whilst also arguably not SEO, this does lower the barrier to entry for new users.

One thing I wouldn’t recommend, however, is to use third-party “SEO” add-ons such as Minerva SEO or Community SEO, they’re really not necessary. A lot of users migrating from vBulletin see the lack of the vBSEO plugin as being a big loss when they switch to IP.Board, but realistically it isn’t. It’s rare that these users can actually give you a valid reason that vBSEO was useful or necessary for them, nor does anyone have any metrics to prove its value. IPS themselves have a very well indexed forum, and, obviously, have never used any of these. The built in functionality is more than enough, and installing these third party hacks merely prevents them from working correctly, and makes it more difficult for you to take advantage of improved features that will come in future releases.

To reiterate and add to my initial point. Your forum should be all about the content. That means that if you’re just starting out, you need to be posting good content, regularly. Once your site starts to become popular, you’ll be getting a lot of content from your members, but your input shouldn’t stop there. The best thing you can do to aid in good rankings, and to attract more users to your forum, is to be writing great content on a regular basis. That means if you know a lot about the subject you’re covering, you should be writing detailed articles about it. If it’s something that changes often, make sure that you’re keeping existing content up to date, and posting news about changes and related events. This content should be unique to your site, don’t just copy and paste from elsewhere. It’s fine to be inspired by outside sources, but write your own articles.

The final thing I’d recommend in this section is that you make sure that any advice you take is backed up by more than one person, or comes from a reputable source. There’s been advice from people who sound like they know exactly what they’re talking about, which is just plain wrong. This includes things such as removing the board name from the <title> tag on every page in the name of SEO, this isn’t going to help, it’s likely it could even hinder you. Unique titles are important, but having common keywords in there, especially your site name, is not going to hurt.

What you should do elsewhere

The previous section of my post was all about what you should do on your own site, from optimisation tips to writing great content regularly. This section will cover the key things to do elsewhere, and in a lot of ways, it’s more of the same. Arguably, if you’ve followed the key point of the last section, you’re writing great content – and that’s going naturally get people linking to you, so there’s no need for you to go on a link building / link exchange campaign.

However, to get your site going, one of the best things you can do is to participate on other people’s sites as well as your own. This might sound a bit odd, but bear with me. If you’ve got a link in your signature on a forum where people of similar interests can be found, you’re doing a great deal to promote your own web site, if you post quality, authoritative content on other people’s web sites. You’ll be respected by the site owners, so they won’t remove your link, and you’ll attract the interest of other members on those forums, who’ll start looking at your site too. The same advice applies to related blogs.

With that being said, do not spam other sites. Only post on other sites if you’ve got something worthwhile to contribute. Posting on another site merely to advertise your own is not useful, and will likely only serve to lose respect for your site – it might even get you banned from that site, or your own site banned from the search engines.

You might also wish to consider setting up a Twitter account and Facebook page for your forum, and make sure that you push only your best content to it. If you’ve written a great article, tweet about it – but don’t tweet every time someone posts, you’ll only be ignored. If you set up a Facebook page, make sure that members can’t post much content to it, have it so that your content is pushed to it as another method of distributing it to users and potential users.

With promotion set aside, a lot of off site SEO work is about statistics. You need to get yourselves accounts at all of the following, and look at the data they provide you on a regular basis:

• Google Webmaster Tools – This is Google’s outlet for telling you how your site is doing in the search engine. It’ll tell you what terms your site is appearing for and which terms are actually generating clicks. It’ll tell you if it’s struggling to index your content, and why, along with a whole host of other information. If you’re appearing for a lot of terms but not getting any click throughs, you might want to consider writing an article specifically about that topic. If you took my earlier advice of getting a sitemap plugin, submit the resulting sitemap here. It’ll help Google to index your content more efficiently, and learn about what content you consider to be worth ranking (hint: that’s not everything.)
• Google Analytics – This is another Google outlet, more specifically focussed on how users find your site, who they are and what they do when they get there. It’s truly invaluable.
• Bing Webmaster Central – This is the Microsoft Bing equivalent to Google Webmaster Tools. It’s not as good, and not as helpful, but can still provide a useful insight into how they view your site.
• Yahoo Site Explorer – As above, but for Yahoo! search.

Summary

All in all, I’d argue that as long as you and your users are creating great content, as a forum owner, you don’t need to worry too much about search engine optimisation. If you write great things, people will come and those with sites will link to it. If you have great content and people are linking to it, the search engines will like your forum too. This is what they’ve all been saying all along, and frankly, it’s true.

I hope that you’ve found this article useful. Whilst it’s not a comprehensive guide, it should get most people started. If you’ve got anything to add, or any feedback, please send me it. I’ll very gladly update this article or post follow ups with other great tips and tricks. Additionally, if you have any specific questions or would like some advice, post it below and I or someone else, will try to answer it for you.