Do a forum help the SEO of a site

[Stocks]

I was think of adding a forum to one of my sites and was wondering if there would be any SEO benifit of adding a forum.

[Randy]

Indirectly, yes. You don't automatically rank better because your site has a forum, but you inevitably catch more longtail traffic because a forum, by its very nature, adds a lot of content to your site. (Assuming that it's an active forum.)

[Stocks]

Originally Posted by Randy

Indirectly, yes. You don't automatically rank better because your site has a forum, but you inevitably catch more longtail traffic because a forum, by its very nature, adds a lot of content to your site. (Assuming that it's an active forum.)

Ya thats what I ment so you can almost say its like adding more content to you site.

Thanks man

[Randy]

Yeah, it's exactly like adding more content to your site. You can use keyword repetition, keyword emphasis, and deeplinking strategies to make forum threads rank in the search engines. Forum threads are just more web pages, as far as the search engines are concerned.

[Sebastien]

Interesting question.

As Randy said, adding a forum will benefit SEO indirectly.

But one thing I do notice is that simply adding comments can improve SEO. If you are using Wordpress and have a regular stream of comments, Google sees this as new content and your post becomes alive so to speak.

This is a strategy that flopturnriver dot com has used successfully. If you look at their top ranking pages they often have 50 + highly relevant and on topic comments underneath the main content area. I suspect they may write some of it themselves.

Here is an example for : "full tilt poker referral code"

http://www.flopturnriver.com/reviews...r-FullTilt.php

Seems to be working for them although the comments are only 1 of the contributing SEO factors of course.

[Randy]

Michael Martinez wrote a detailed post on one of his blogs not too long ago about how to use nofollow comment blogs to build visibility to a website. Part of the strategy was to find a dozen or so blogs that nofollow their comments and who post regularly. Then you add comments - really well thought out, extensive comments, of 100 words+, which include keywords that the post should rank for. By increasing the repetition of the keyword phrases, the post ranks better, and some of the people who visit those posts click through to your site.

You might notice that I sometimes repeat and emphasize keyword phrases in replies to posts here. There's a reason for that.

[kingcobra]

That's interesting Randy. No follow and even no link actually does help although not quite to the extent of a follow post, but your url does get in there and gets indexed as well as your keywords. For instance, if you do a search for http://yourpokersite.com, you'll find not only nofollows but idiots who steal your content from other forums and post it on theirs but change the link to httpyourpokersitecom. It's in the search results for your site and that adds a little at least.

In answer to the original question, yes it's 99 44/100% pure content and content is a good thing. I hadn't thought enough about optimizing the forum other than having some keywords on it but you're absolutely right Randy and I'm going to run with that - big thanks.

Ken
http://kingcobrapoker.com