What type of content will help your forum grow?

[The Cyst]

Hey all, hope you're having a good day.

I have recently released my new forum Sin Studios and want to know what type of content will be best to grow a new forum?

I am posting tutorials but aside from that, what would be the best content?

Idea is based on software/hardware for server development of all types.

I have posted a few question and answer threads, such as "what's your favourite food" but can't exactly have a 15 post conversation with myself lol.

 

[TPerry]

How are you doing your "tutorials"? I'd at least be using the article format option.... but better yet, I'd strongly suggest looking at @Bob's AMS add-on and then doing them in there. If you are going to do tutorials/articles, it will be WELL worth the money. You can get a much cleaner layout, especially if you are using multi-page/step setups that have quite a bit of detail, as you can have "pages" in AMS. I have found also that content in AMS content ranks well in Google.



As for best content... you really want to work on trying to create content that isn't found elsewhere and is of interest.

 

[The Cyst]

Thank you Tracy, I was originally just posting tutorials on a thread in the relevant forum. I will have a look into your suggestions now and action them in due course.

I really appreciate you taking the time to educate me, thank you.

 

[Brad P]

Agree @Bob AMS is outstanding! worth reading on

 

[briansol]

no one is going to google 'what's your favorite food' and go to your site.

What will people google? server development questions.
"What's better, Rust or Python for _________" ?

stuff like that

 

[The Cyst]

Agree @Bob AMS is outstanding! worth reading on

Thank you for vouching, Bob. Just reading up on it now and it looking at Tracy's website as an example - very impressive work! Might have to make the investment.

no one is going to google 'what's your favorite food' and go to your site.

What will people google? server development questions.
"What's better, Rust or Python for _________" ?

stuff like that

Thank you Briansol. This is a very good recommendation, I will investigate what type of questions need answering and answer them on the forum. Thank you!

 

[TPerry]

Might have to make the investment.

Forgot to mention one thing that you can do when creating entries that does have to do with sharing/search engine discovery...

 

[The Cyst]

Amazing! Thank you Tracy.

 

[Mr Lucky]

Thank you for vouching, Bob. Just reading up on it now and it looking at Tracy's website as an example - very impressive work! Might have to make the investment.

I wouldn't bother with an Article addon unless you find you really need it for some reason. For SEO the built in Article threads work very well.

Thank you Briansol. This is a very good recommendation, I will investigate what type of questions need answering and answer them on the forum. Thank you!

Yes, you need to think like someone looking for answers and the sort of questions they put into Google. I am setting up a dedicated Articles page here. One problem with user generated content is that people don't generally think about SEO. I have a dedicated article section here , and am gradually going through and editing titles so that they contain the important keywords people are searching for.

The first step is to think about what words are people are using in real life searches and not what you may (at first) think they ought to be using.

 

[Mr Lucky]

Some further thoughts, because this is actually a very interesting question. The kind of content you get on forums often works against SEO. So it's ironic that for people to find your forum you need the things that google etc likes, ie strong well written and focussed content. However many forum users enjoy the humorous and off topic banter you get in some threads, which make Google view that thread as less useful.

I sometimes go through old threads and "curate" them, ie remove some posts that are useless or bad for SEO, so the thread asa whole's a much higher percentage of relevant and meaningful content and stands a better chance of getting ranked well in search engines.

I don't do it in current threads as members don't like it and think I'm being a killjoy if I delete the banter.

So I think it you need a balance of forum curating posts, but also having plenty of articles that you have written specifically. With articles it's important to have them well written as Google likes that.

• Check your grammar and spelling.
• Title, headings and subheadings with useful keywords to give the article a good shape and readability.
• Use keywords in text but in a natural way rather than contrived.
• Use images with alt text
• Have some links to relevant articles elsewhere

You can make the articles read only to avoid users "diluting" them, although that can be a double edged sword because as well as the guff, user generated content can also add some useful insights.

 

[The Cyst]

Curating past topics is a very interesting technique and I can imagine that takes a lot of time. You see that technique applied to blogs, they have "the best forums to visit in 2023" but it was actually posted in 2019. They recognise that nobody is going to care about 2019 anymore a better search term is 2023.

Thank you for taking the time to respond, I have posted this on several forums and on one there was as negative response for some reason. I think they got out of the wrong side of the bed lol. I shared the same enthusiasm you did because forums by the very nature answer questions that people are asking. However, you're penalised because the buzz words are not there and it's not 10,000 words long with FAQ's and images.

Thank you for the information regarding the article system, I will focus on the built in functionality first and see how that geos - can always upgrade to the plugin at a later date if needed.

 

[cdub]

As for best content... you really want to work on trying to create content that isn't found elsewhere and is of interest.

This. You need unique and useful content.

 

[Suzanne O]

I usually post up things that are linked to my forums theme.
As my forum's theme is mainly a general one with a lot of talk about the aussie footy league. I'll pick up on an article that picks up on an everyday topic.

 

[TPerry]

I usually post up things that are linked to my forums theme.

I think you mean niche... and I'm pretty sure all of us do that. But posting content that can easily be found elsewhere on a higher ranked site does you no good. You need to have content that is not as "wide-spread". Everybody can talk about how to bake a cake... but when you get to talking about baking a chocolate dump cake using fresh walnuts and a certain type of chocolate, your impact will be much higher.

 

[Wildcat Media]

You can make the articles read only to avoid users "diluting" them, although that can be a double edged sword because as well as the guff, user generated content can also add some useful insights.

Here's one idea to get around it. It's a two-step process for members (which could be inconvenient), but I've seen a couple of forums offer an article that is read-only, then at the bottom of the article they link to the discussion thread. The key is to not repeat the article in the discussion thread--just a teaser or very brief excerpt (with a link back to the article) is plenty good enough.

In a sense, the XF Resource Manager does the same thing, but it is not friendly for use as an article system without some template reworking and even so, some users might not understand that 1) the discussion is available through a tab at the top of the resource, and 2) that the review system isn't a place for discussion (although I'm sure it could be disabled through permissions, or omitted in the templates).

I'm not all that concerned with SEO on our niche site, but I'm still hoping to find a way to make a search forum our home page, using the "grid" article layout for that page. I could eliminate our satellite "home" site we have in WordPress, which nobody ever updates.