Google Optimization

[abud]

Hello all, I just joined with this great community...I'm glad to be a part of this forum...

I have web forums related with automotive, i have a plan to get free traffic from Google search engine...I think, my forums must be search engine optimization.

I get many usefull info to make my sites SEO from this forum (Mod_Rewrite and Google sitemaps).

I want to ask, after I Install :

1. phpBB SEO Advanced mod Rewrite V 0.0.2
2. mx Google Sitemaps V 1.0RC2

is it enough?? or is there any mod that I have to add for my forum??

Thanks a lot

Cheers,
Abud

[dcz]

Welcome

So first, Search Engine Optimization will always depend in the end on the quality of your web-site's content.

But it is true some optimization will help out a lot, because many things can just make a web-site impossible to spider for bots, like when they have SIDs in URL or URLs with php variables.

So the basics principle to follow, and this applies to every Search Engines, are quite simple :

1) content
2) links
3) code

Content is what comes first, once your site is indexed, thus Search Engine Optimized or at least not impossible to spider. So you want your keywords to appear in your content and you want your content to link, using those keywords, to other pages of your site.

Links, and here I mean every links : Internal links, External Links and Backlinks. And It's not only a matter of number, but as well of quality.
To get well ranked in Search Engines you need to work on providing many good quality links. And internal linking is very important as well to allow good PageRank transmission.

Code, because it does counts as well. First you need clean html output and then, you need fast page loading. Bots and human don't like to wait too long, they hate when it does not work

Then, as a general enhancement, I advise you as well to take care about your www prefix. -http://m-benzforum.com/ should not load as is


Now as you are using phpBB Forums, let's talk more precisely about it.
Here we decided to provide several mod Rewrite solutions for phpBB, because they all have a real meaning and use.
I see you are using the webmedic mod rewrite, which is injecting topic titles in their URLs and would like to migrate to the phpBB advanced mod rewrite.
As you can see extra features added in the phpBB SEO advanced mod rewrite are making it easier to deal with topic title injection, as you can get rid of a part of the title in the URLs and thus avoid some useless words in URLs.
But still, you must note that this need active moderation to make sure no bad titles are being used. A titling policy becomes necessary to obtain good results, but if you can manage to do so, then it's for sure the most powerful enhancement to make to an URL, using keywords in it.
And, another thing that can help, is that you'll still be able, if your board becomes too big, with too many bad posters, to migrate again without losing PageRank to the Mixed or Simple mod Rewrite, again http 301 is watching our backs

So as soon as you decide for sure to migrate, please post a [Migration] topic in the phpBB mod Rewrite forum, and I'll tell you the easy steps to follow. these where already covered in the French forums, so I can already tell you it's easy;)

Please note that it is a lot easier to first migrate and then take care about other matters such as mx Google Sitemaps.

Then, to continue answering, mx Google Sitemaps is a must

from 4 to 37 800 cached URLs in Google index in a month, what else ?

You'll just have to make sure it is installed ok before you submit it to Google.

To go further, I advise you install the phpBB SEO Dynamic Meta Tags, because it is very important to at least have dynamic meta descriptions.
And mx Sitemaps as well. Because it will be another occasion to provide good links to bots spidering you pages and, as it will increase the number of links pointing to your topics and forum and enhance your internal linking, allow better PageRank Transmission as well as better PageRanking in general.

Take a look to the demo board, as you can notice, the mx sitemaps is made to be very dynamic, thanks to the last active topic listing, it's most likely every pages of the sitemaps will have changed upon every bot visits, and this is even better to get well Ranked.
And it can be useful to users too, especially thanks to the fact you can add as many links as you want on it's index directly from acp.

Here an examples : http://www.pixelistes.com/portal/sitemaps.html

Then, I'll soon add more tweaks, so keep an eye on the forum


++