SEOenthusiast

SEO by Forum
Set up a forum associated with your site, have your site links as part of the furniture for each page. Moderate the forum for spam, make a decision on outgoing link validity (from forum members) and see extra traffic and extra search engine returns from the posts.
The real value of forums and blogs associated with a web site to help optimise the site for search engine traffic can be seen by considering the roots of Google. They come from academia, as does their cherished algorithm which was based on the popularity of academic articles. They still favour sites in SERPS based on information rather than just product or service listings. This is aided considerably by comments made and replies to those comments made that taken all together provide excellent search engine fodder. If your site has the type of product or service that lends itself to discussion, a forum is an excellent tool for SEM and SEO - SEM by bringing traffic to your site from the forums themselves, SEO by giving the search engines more food to chew on, more pages to index.
When establishing a forum, make a decision on what outgoing links you'll allow. If you have the resource to be able to moderate every comment posted (the same applies to blogs), you can decide on a case by case basis whether to allow the outgoing link. Links may be to resources that support the theme of the forum, or they may be links to other sites for their SEO. You may decide that you can reward a good entry by an outgoing link. It isn't costing you anything - but neither do you want to attract the constant army of comment spammers that fill the entries with meaningless drivel just so they can get a link out. You may decide to moderate every posting to check for spam, or you may decide to limit every outgoing link by placing a rel='nofollow' tag or even by stripping the href html from the link. Beware of competitors posting comments that undermine your business. These might be just negative comments made from people operating under an assumed name.
Many forums have their link from the main website that itself is a javascript redirect or has the rel='nofollow' tag. The forum therefore has no PR leakage from the main site, except that which exists as a link from minor pages on the main site. This also will help us gauge the success of the forum over time from any PR growth through links from other sites.
Finally - when the forum is started and you have a reasonable amount of postings - multiply the effect of the forum many times by making an RSS feed for the forum and spreading the joy by posting the feed to RSS sites. These sites are a gift from the SEO Gods - so don't miss it, as most SEO practitioners do. The star is high, but has not yet started waning - it will. But get the effect whilst you can - they'll last long after submitting to RSS sites is not so easy as in late 2006 and previous.
Further Reading: Forum on SEO Forums | Forum Structure


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