Important SEO tips for MyBB forums

[AmazOuz]

One of the main reasons MyBB forums are easy to use is the ability to make any number of changes easily without any complex modifications. By default, MyBB comes with powerful features but there are still few things related to SEO that can boost your forums and can help you gain Organic traffic from Search Engines. In the past, I wrote about Top Practices that can help gain huge traffic for your forums, in this tutorial I will share some simple yet important SEO tips to boost search engine visibility of your MyBB forums.

1- Use Google SEO plugin
One of the oldest and most powerful plugin for MyBB forums, first released in 2009. This plugin is absolutely important for your forums as it adds features such as Google SEO titles, 404, redirects, and a lot more. It will also create a sitemap for your site which will help in the discovery of your website pages.
Check out this plugin at MyBB Extend : https://community.mybb.com/mods.php?acti...1664241687

2- Use Meta tags to provide a rich experience for Social media crawlers
Social Media has gained a lot of popularity and your meta tags can help google gain more confidence in your website. Use the following code inside your headerinclude template to add such visibility

Code:

<meta name="twitter:card" value="summary">
<meta property="og:title" content="Title " />
<meta property="og:type" content="article" />
<meta property="og:url" content="{$mybb->settings['url']}" />
<meta property="og:image" content="{$mybb->settings['url']}/path/to/picture.jpg" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Description about forum" />

Note – Make sure to replace path/to/picture,jpg with your forum image.

Meta description and canonical tag is added automatically by Google SEO Plugin on all pages. If you want to have seperate meta description on homepage than add the below tag to your index template just after title tag.

Code:

<meta name="description" content="Page description" />

3. Add robots.txt to block access to unwanted pages
Search engines follow robots.txt and honor request to not access pages that are restricted. You can do that using robots.txt, here is a sample robots.txt , you can modify whatever you want.

Code:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /captcha.php
Disallow: /editpost.php
Disallow: /modcp.php
Disallow: /moderation.php
Disallow: /newreply.php
Disallow: /newthread.php
Disallow: /printthread.php
Disallow: /private.php
Disallow: /ratethread.php
Disallow: /report.php
Disallow: /sendthread.php
Disallow: /task.php
Disallow: /usercp.php
Disallow: /usercp2.php
Disallow: /archive
Disallow: /online.php
Disallow: /calendar.php
Disallow: /reputation.php
Disallow: /search.php
Disallow: /*nextoldest*
Disallow: /*nextnewest*
Disallow: /*datecut*
Disallow: /*lastpost*
Disallow: /*markread*

4- Reduce Pagespeed
Pagespeed is an important metric in your website rankings, higher would be the ranking if the page load is faster. Check your website for potential improvements at Google Pagespeed Insights. Get a SEO friendly theme to get most of the benefits of page speed.

These are our top SEO tips for MyBB forums to increase your rankings and visibility in search engines.

Source : WallBB (https://community.mybb.com/user-105159.html)