Help Making a Discusssion Forum SE Friendly

[Claire]

I've been reading through this forum, trying to gather as much information as possible.

I am new to all of this, I have recently started a message board. I do not know how to get more members and how to make it more searchable on Google. I am absolutely clueless but desperate to learn!

I know you speak about adding key words to meta tags, but I don't know where these key words are suppposed to be inserted and how they are supposed to be done, is there any way that somebody could give me step by step instructions?


Thank you,
Claire x

[Wail]

Hi Claire,

I wouldn't worry about meta tags and the like first. The first thing to check is that your forums have spiderable URLs; some forum use sessions and some, like this one, do not.

As a crude but effective rule of thumb the sorter the address of forum posts the better.

So www.example.com/forum/post.php?id=1200 is good
And www.example.com/forum/post.php?sess=3432@s1243ds#23132933 is bad.

Could you post a sample of a post URL to this thread but change your domain name to "example" just so we can be squeaky clean about not promoting sites here.

[JPnyc]

What he said. The biggest problem spiders have with forums is their dynamic urls. This forum that we're on generates a static archive page just to facilitate spider crawling.