what are the characteristics of SEO template ?

[AmirAbbas]

hi

somethnig is not clear for me
why the template of all forum softwares are dirty and full of unuseful codes
you can not find any seo template for phpbb, vb, smf ,mybb and other similar
forum softwares. only the template of phorum software in good but that template
is another problem (the CSS codes are in header of each page and that style is not beautiful)
i think with a little effort we can make a SEO template

i want to know, which part must be changed.

1- i think in overall_footer.tpl and overall_footer.tpl we can use <div> tags instead of tables.

2- in index_body.tpl we have a table and some rows.
i think we can put each forum in <li> tag (i think that we can make an unordered list for each section). in table based design we have a cell for this picture:



another row for forum title and description.
another cell for number of topics
another for number of total post on that forum
another one for last post section

is it necessary for having all of them ?
i don't think so. the number of topics or post is not very important for users and in the other hand we can put them under description of the forum instead of putting them in new cell

3- in viewforum_body.tpl
i think we can use unordred list for list of topics in viewforum page

4- in viewtopic_body.tpl
we can style this tpl file with CSS without using tables.
using table is not bad for this part but i must style it completely by css

i search a lot for finding a SEO template for phpbb
i found this three template

phpbblite -http://jupix.info/phpBBlite/viewtopic.php?t=36
chairs -http://jasidog.com/phpbb/15/Chairs
bones -http://www.phpbbsmith.com/hacks/bones.php

i checked all of them. they are better that ordinary templates but they are not completely SEO templates. i think bone template is better than other templates.

only the template of stylegala is completeley SEO template.

stylegala forum -http://forum.stylegala.com/

i want to know how can we style template for SEO matters ?
using which HTML tags are better ?
i need some concepts.

[AmirAbbas]

ok

i tried to remove extra HTML codes forum index page

i used XHTML 1.0 transitional DOCTYPE
i removed all tables forum index_body.tpl, overall_header, overall_footer.tpl
i put all forums in <ul> tag
title of forums are in <h2> tags
i think, now index page is completely clean and based on semantic design

note: this pages are not styled by CSS. i only prepared it for test
i need some suggestion.

download link

-http://rapidshare.com/files/5736875/subSilver.zip.html

this zip file contains four files
overall_header.tpl , overall_footer.tpl , index_body.tpl , subSilver.css

im not professional in designing but i think we can make a good template with some effort
after optimizing index page i will work on viewforum page and at last of viewtopic page

this three page are the most important pages. other files are not important because they don't contain any text for indexing.

[dcz]

Well, you even solved the problem before I could answer you

You got it all, again, the lighter the better, so <div>, <ul>, <li>, <hx> are our favorite here.

As a user, I do not like the phpbblite templates this much, the chair one is a bit nicer, more or less the same with the bones one.

And here come the more tricky part, it's quite a pain to build up a nice css template with more than background colors and rectangles as a design, especially if you want the design to be the same on many resolution and browsers.

So for sure, in case a basic design is ok, go for divs and get rid of tables, it won't be this hard.
As you said, you'll just need to take care of the three templates you mentioned.

The sytegala web site is for sure nicely optimised, but I am not a fan.
I am wondering how the templates turns out when logged, because I find the SubSilver Index very handy to find out new posts and such. Did they keep the last post link and such for logged users ?

Anyway, purely SEO wise, the index_tpl you wrote down is a optimised as sitegala.

Adding the last active topics on index, with a part of the content is a good idea, and will be very easy to do with our upcoming RSS module

But do not forget, the most important is content and links. Bots do make it to find text in tables layouts. The real benefit is the page is lighter and thus your site indexed in less time.

It could be an idea to start talking a bit more about design here, and why not release templates.

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[sportman1280]

i was also trying to do this. Can you explain how to do it? I have a theme called fiblack3dblue, that has a lot of mods on it.

[AmirAbbas]

hi sportman1280

im working on it
i tried to make a page without table.
at first i want to complete index page after that, viewforum and finally viewtopic page.

i have problem with putting the statistic of forum (total topic stat, total post stat, last poster and time) in right side of a <li> tag
i will put it somewhere for test and i will give link for view and test

[mreider]

I did this once before - stripped out every table and got it workign perfect with CSS disv, and it was great - But then whenever I went to upgrade phpbb (when a new version gets released) the upgrades would fail because it looks for specific blocks of code which was no longer there.

And I'd have trouble installing some mods too.

But I strongly recommend doing it if you know what you're doing - It's such brutal coding on the phpbb subsilver template that you can easily remove a bunch of tables without any negative side effects. Benefits include smaller page sizes (so faster downloads, less bandwidth) and having more content than code in your pages (good for se's).

[sportman1280]

I never did understand why phpbb does it with tables... seems so silly to use code that you know isnt the standard anymore... .

[dcz]

phpBB 2.0.xx is old and was mainly designed for transitional html, so, I guess we have a clue here.

Besides, some layouts are extremely hard to build without tables if you want it to display nicely on all browser and resolutions.

A good news is the French phpBB Team decided to release an XHTML 1.0 valid version of subsilver. It's still using tables, and many had done similar things, but this one is a very good base to start working on.

So far the How-to is not translated, but here is the link to the thread, and the download link : XHTML 1.0 Valid subSilver.

It's the official version that will come with phpBB for the two mains phpBB support forum.

I'll soon translate it

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[sportman1280]

wow. thanks for the heads up! Now i just have to figure out how to mimic it into my current theme at http://www.hyundaituners.com lol.... crap

actually, ive already started to fix some things. posts are in divs , not spans now. bbcodes are tables, so if u had a bbcode in a post u effectively had a table inside a span!!! I hope you continue to post some hints, as i am making progress because of ur posts .

thanks again.

[mreider]

One tip - edit subsilver.cfg and change the base directory for images.

For example, I made mine "img" so i changed the base image directory to "/img"

Then all the image urls went from being "/templates/subsilver/images/really_long_path.gif" to "/img/image.gif".

Then all I did was copy the subsilver images into the /img folder. Not a huge thing, but definitely helps cut down the code bloat!

[AmirAbbas]

[mreider]

I also removed the title="" attribute from the images, and blanked out a bunch of the alt attributes that I thought were kinda useless. But that's getting picky

You could also rename all the individual images. I also ran them through an image compressor just to help knock down bandwidth. The faster the site is, the better too

[AmirAbbas]

[dcz]

Very nice amir

Have you noticed the difference in text size between IE and FF ?

Entering the CSS exceptions world

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[AmirAbbas]