[SEO] Increase the traffic of your MyBB forums

[SEO] Increase the traffic of your MyBB forums - Printable Version

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[SEO] Increase the traffic of your MyBB forums - AmazOuz - 12-29-2017

Hi folks !

Who doesn't want better traffic for his own forums ? Not you of course Tongue

To attract more people you must follow before everything the basics of SEO optimization.

One : Adding meta tags

They are HTML tags you must include your head tags (<head></head>) of each page.
In MyBB, the head tags content is generated by the template "headerinclude" which is inside "Ungrouped Templates" of your "XXX Templates" (XXX = your theme's name), you must go to "Style & Templates" in Admin Panel. Then you insert this code :

Code:
<meta name="title" content="YOUR FORUMS TITLE">

<meta name="description" content="DESCRIPTION OF YOUR FORUMS">

<meta name="keywords" content="TAGS, KEYWORDS SEPARATED BY COMMA">

<meta name="language" content="English">

<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">

Two : Creating a "robots.txt" file

Web site owners use the /robots.txt file to give instructions about their site to web robots; this is called The Robots Exclusion Protocol.
It works likes this: a robot wants to vists a Web site URL, say http://www.example.com/welcome.html. Before it does so, it firsts checks for http://www.example.com/robots.txt, and finds:

Code:
User-agent: *

Disallow: /

The "User-agent: *" means this section applies to all robots. The "Disallow: /" tells the robot that it should not visit any pages on the site.
You must upload the robots.txt to the root directory of your forums.
Examples of robots.txt :

Code:
User-agent: *

Disallow: 

Disallow: /inc/

Disallow: /admin/

Sitemap: https://developement.design/forum/sitemap.xml

Three : Creating a Sitemap

In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for your forums along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site. You must upload the sitemap.xml to the root directory of your forums.

Examples of Sitemap generators :

Code:
https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

http://www.xsitemap.com/

https://smallseotools.com/xml-sitemap-generator/

Four : Submit your forums link to search engines

How will Google or Bing know your forums ? They aren't there to help you without any effort from your part, you must go yourself in google or bing webmaster tools submit your forums link and add your sitemap.

Google => https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url
Bing => https://www.bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url
Others => https://www.entireweb.com/free_submission/

Five : Make your forums rich in content

We must note that the most important factor is the high quality content of your forums.
Why users will browse your forums instead of other ones, if they are richer in content and more helpful while you both discuss the main domain of activity (for example, both of you talk about graphics) ?
Your forums must be not only rich in content, but unique, sharing stuffs users won't find on any other forums.

More : Google SEO Plugin for MyBB 1.8/1.6

If you search MyBB mods site you'll discover a great plugin created by "frostschutz" which makes all the tasks easier and automatic, the features :

Code:
Google SEO 404:

    Error pages return HTTP 404 Not Found (and others) instead of 200 OK

    Custom 404 error pages

    Google's 404 widget

Google SEO Meta:

    description meta tags for forums / threads / etc.

    specify canonical pages

    nofollow links

Google SEO Redirect:

    redirect old URLs to new URLs (or vice versa)

    avoid URL breakage and double content

Google SEO Sitemap:

    dynamic generation of XML Sitemaps

    search engines find your content without crawling

Google SEO URL:

    Keyword URLs (e.g. Thread-Some-Subject instead of showthread.php?tid=12345)

    UTF-8 in URLs is supported

    Customizable URL styles

Download: https://community.mybb.com/mods.php?action=view&pid=789
GitHub: https://github.com/frostschutz/MyBB-Google-SEO
Documentation: https://github.com/frostschutz/MyBB-Goog...le_seo.rst
Bugtracker: https://github.com/frostschutz/MyBB-Google-SEO/issues

See you in another tutorial Wink