Another SEO question / help thread..

Glockie

Well-known member
Hello,
Can anyone help or advise on Xenforo and SEO?
I've read in many threads that XF is fantastic out of the box .. I'm waiting for the magic to happen atm though and this is why I am asking.

I currently also use the CTA Featured Threads and am wondering about the SEO or SEM from this too?
So... if you have it, and use it, has your SEO and page search / results improved?
Did traffic improve?
Wordpress is superb for SEO as we all know.
Would a WP install > bridge > XF work?
Or even a Sub domain WP > read more links > XF work too or better even?

I've asked around and searched everywhere but am struggling to find the right answers if I am honest.

I *really* need to increase my rankings and SEO. Okay granted the site has been live for only several weeks, but I am way way way down in Google...
Pages 7-10 for specific term searches.
So I am panicking a touch about SEO and whether or not the blocks will do the job for SEO (it LOOKS like it will) or if WP will help further, with a bridge/add-on.

I hope someone can help with some of these questions I have.
Many thanks
 
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If you've been paying attention to the SEO world you'll know that basic SEO techniques are generally a waste of time now. SEO is good out of the box. The only real way to increase ranks is to get good links by having great content.
 
If you've been paying attention to the SEO world you'll know that basic SEO techniques are generally a waste of time now. SEO is good out of the box. The only real way to increase ranks is to get good links by having great content.

Of course I have and naturally, content is king..
But there are always ways to improve your search results, always.
 
XF is as good as WP for SEO installed. Most softwares are nowadays. Everything else has nothing to do with the software, and everything to do with content, links, social networks, marketing, so forth. The www is only getting more competitive every day, thus you have to consistently step-up your game to keep pace.
 
SEO tricks and tips are a waste of time these days.
On forums in general?
Hand crafted sites work perfectly like so, with brilliant content.

But forums wise, the SEO flames are withering and - as mentioned, content is king yes?
We have very rich, specific content, and I am wondering if this will help with search results/content you see?

We are heavily crawled and indexed which is of course perfect, but what worries me most is page listings for specifics. Not keywords as such, but content keywords.
We seem to changed, for instance; It took me two weeks to get our site name listed on page one, so users can find us.. Lovely.
Then this week, we've dropped significantly - with only minor changes.

It is a young and fledgling community, so will take some time of course, but I am wondering what else I can do to help it along the way.
If the old SEO tricks are long dead, then so be it. I still have lots of very good content, but getting it 'out there' seems to be an issue.
For some reason.....
 
Everything else has nothing to do with the software, and everything to do with content, links, social networks, marketing, so forth. The www is only getting more competitive every day, thus you have to consistently step-up your game to keep pace.

Totally agree, I'm used to working with VB and then my own work which is HTML5 /4 CSS 2.0 & 3
So going into XF the past few months and being live for only 1 of those, is difficult for me, to try and gauge where we stand with everything.
You know, we as admins all know that it is content that works. And let's be honest, I wouldn't stick around on a site that had bad content.

But I seem to obviously be hung up on, getting that content 'pushed' rather than it being 'picked up'.
The latter being the boy now.
Patience is key, most likely. :)
 
Right, by providing good content and community experience. SEO tricks and tips are a waste of time these days.
Partially true... the old SEO methods have definitely gone to the wayside and webmasters should spend time on creating great sites that users love.

On-page SEO stuff these days is more advanced than it used to be, but there's definitely still stuff you can do. Proper use of nofollow, canonicalization, proper use of structured data, etc. A good way to think of it is that most of the SEO stuff these days is about helping the search engine better understand your page. While SEO of the past was about manipulating search engines.

That's not to say there isn't still some advanced stuff that you can do to "help a search engine along"... :) Things like PageRank sculpting (hate to still call it that since Google's public PageRank is more or less a deprecated metric... but they still use it internally).

One of these days, I've been meaning to spin out all the SEO related stuff I've done for our XF install into it's own stand-alone add-on. Someday when there are 5,000 hours in a day. :)
 
Oh... and one of the biggest ones, internal linking. Having automatic software adding internal links once per thread or such, to relevant content in your site, priceless. Internal links will gather you a lot of credence with hard to get terms, and most long tail terms can be ranked internally nowadays, providing you have the push with the relevant harder terms.

If you really want to step into the more expert area of SEO, then domain stacking for a keyword, or group of relevant keywords, is one way to do it. Relatively cheap, a little time consuming, but most of it can be automated. Its really your time being eaten up to achieve it, along with awaiting Google to do its job. Push enough domains into another, stack them again and again, all leading to an authoritative single domain in which you push your keywords onto your site. You can repeat that process as much as you want, building 10+ authoritative domains, all targeting different terms or groups of terms.
 
Oh... and one of the biggest ones, internal linking. Having automatic software adding internal links once per thread or such, to relevant content in your site, priceless. Internal links will gather you a lot of credence with hard to get terms, and most long tail terms can be ranked internally nowadays, providing you have the push with the relevant harder terms.

If you really want to step into the more expert area of SEO, then domain stacking for a keyword, or group of relevant keywords, is one way to do it. Relatively cheap, a little time consuming, but most of it can be automated. Its really your time being eaten up to achieve it, along with awaiting Google to do its job. Push enough domains into another, stack them again and again, all leading to an authoritative single domain in which you push your keywords onto your site. You can repeat that process as much as you want, building 10+ authoritative domains, all targeting different terms or groups of terms.

Excellent advice..
I already perform manual internal linking based on obviously, terms.. Very time consuming but worth every second. :)
Domain stacking is brilliant and this is great advice. Don't know if it works on forums, but it should do?
As you say, time consuming again, but likely to be very worthwhile.
 
Domain stacking works on any site, as you create an isolated network of content, pushing authority from domain to domain, stacking a single authoritative domain that you monetise / market.
 
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