What is SEO and what are the best practices?

[Dan The Man]

This thread is for the general discussion of the Article What is SEO and what are the best practices?. Please add to the discussion here.

 

[Nomad]

Not many realize this but your effort to search engine optimization begins with domain registration. If you can have a two-word keyword rich (based on your niche) domain, half of the battle will be won.

 

[Cedric]

Very nice tips @Dan The Man
I converted this to an article.

 

[Arantor]

Those tips are sound - if you're running a blog, or if you're a forum with a healthy set of articles or a knowledge base or similar. But any space that the regular members can publish content - and remember, on a forum that's basically everywhere by design - a lot of that will go out the window.

There's not exactly a lot of 'on page SEO' going on with a regular forum post, and I guarantee people don't use it for good back-link building in general. But this is why Google downranked a lot of UGC pages a few years ago...

 

[Dan The Man]

Those tips are sound - if you're running a blog, or if you're a forum with a healthy set of articles or a knowledge base or similar. But any space that the regular members can publish content - and remember, on a forum that's basically everywhere by design - a lot of that will go out the window.

There's not exactly a lot of 'on page SEO' going on with a regular forum post, and I guarantee people don't use it for good back-link building in general. But this is why Google downranked a lot of UGC pages a few years ago...

You can incorporate SEO with the titling of forum threads and include keyword density in the thread itself to improve forum SEO.

 

[Arantor]

You can for your threads. Will your members be happy if you edit their threads for SEO purposes? (That was my real point here. User generated content is just that, user generated. My experience is that people don't *really* like it if you edit their content without good reason, and I've yet to see a forum whose members are happy about their content being tweaked for extended advertising like that.)