Search terms in forum name

arch stanton · PR1 Joined: 04 Oct 2006 Posts: 117

For a long time, my forum name had a number of keywords added, so that instead of just "Example :: Index" etc appearing at the top of pages, it would say "Example (unofficial blah blah blah board) :: Index" etc.

Was this in fact counter-productive, i.e. would Google have seen thousands of pages with those terms on it and penalised the site?

I am now experimenting with having just the name only at the top, but am worried about losing placing for those search terms.

dcz · Posted: Sat Jan 06, 2007 6:34 pm Post subject: Re: Search terms in forum name

you're talking about page titles aren't you Wink

well, page titles should be short and related to the page.

There no gain if you add a bunch of words not even used in the page content.

In this case again, the simpler the better.

The page title should more or less be the content title, which itself should be fairly descriptive and using the most interesting keywords of the topic.

Here it's not he number that counts, but rather the relevancy.

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arch stanton · PR1 Joined: 04 Oct 2006 Posts: 117

dcz · Posted: Sat Jan 06, 2007 8:12 pm Post subject: Re: Search terms in forum name

what is for sure is, it did not help out.

we're about to release a powerful title optimization for phpBB, so keep tuned Wink

arch stanton · PR1 Joined: 04 Oct 2006 Posts: 117

dcz · Posted: Sat Jan 06, 2007 8:34 pm Post subject: Re: Search terms in forum name

Well, you may have ended up a bit better ranked on those specific words, but I am sure it was not helping in the end, because, topic covering other topics would just be less considered, and this would end up into less pages being well ranked on other search queries, the one you even did not think about at first, and most likely the one to bring the most visits as well.

If you really want to optimize on keywords, write articles about them, good ones, specifically targeted for each one of your targeted ones, and human friendly of course. They should be good articles in which you just do not forget to repeat the good keywords more than once, but only when it's useful, for real.

And Use them in the article's page title.

This is far better than trying to pretend all of your web site's pages are related to these keywords, even when it's not the case at all.

I mean, here, we talk about SEO, and SEO is one of the most used words, do you see any spam indexing here ?
nope, we just use the words we need to write what we want to talk about. My point is the good keywords should naturally be used in a web site, no need to try to add weight on the randomly.
You'll get better results if you work on content.

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