SEO tweaks for IPB 3.2 (Board Index Page)

Hello

It's no secrete to all of you SEO fanatics that forum software developers don't pay much attention to SEO. So it's your job to tweak your IPB installation to suit your purpose. In this blog post, I'm gonna show you very simple tweaks you can do to enhance your on-page SEO.

before we begin, let me remind you that the most important factors of on-page SEO is keywords and links. We sometimes express that by contents but contents boil down to keywords. So always think keywords. For example, if your board is about playstation 3 but the word "playstation" is rarely found on your website, then do you think you gonna rank for the word "playstation"? But remember not to stuff keywords because you will penalized for that. The keywords must be within the natural flow of your posts like in normal and meaningful sentences, but I digress so let's do some tweaking:

links REL and title contents

this is one of the SEO most destructive things IPB has. It's why you see your most significant keyword being things like: forum, post, articles, to, from, etc. So we need to change that.

goto: ACP -> look and feel -> manage skin sets and templates -> your skin (the one that guest and bots see)
click on the Board Index category and open the boardIndexTemplate, find:

<a class='toggle right' href='#' title="{$this->lang->words['toggle_cat']}">{$this->lang->words['toggle_cat']}</a> <a href="{parse url="showforum={$_data['cat_data']['id']}" seotitle="{$_data['cat_data']['name_seo']}" template="showforum" base="public"}" title='{$this->lang->words['view_cat']}'>{$_data['cat_data']['name']}</a>

the default title of this link is: toggle this category. Imagine that, thousands of websites all have the same keyword: category. Is that good for SEO? Is it even good for people using screen readers?

we're going to change it to: toggle (name of your category).  Here is how it should look like:

<a class='toggle right' href='#' title=" toggle {$_data['cat_data']['name']}">toggle {$_data['cat_data']['name']}</a>

the very next link is the one that shows your category name and link but as you would guess, the title of the link is: view category. Let's change that, find:

<a href="{parse url="showforum={$_data['cat_data']['id']}" seotitle="{$_data['cat_data']['name_seo']}" template="showforum" base="public"}" title='{$this->lang->words['view_cat']}'>{$_data['cat_data']['name']}</a>

change to

<a href="{parse url="showforum={$_data['cat_data']['id']}" seotitle="{$_data['cat_data']['name_seo']}" template="showforum" base="public"}" title='view {$_data['cat_data']['name']}'>{$_data['cat_data']['name']}</a>

much better! now find:

<a href="{parse url="showforum={$forum_data['id']}" seotitle="{$forum_data['name_seo']}" template="showforum" base="public"}" title='{$this->lang->words['go_to_forum']}'>{$forum_data['name']}</a>

these are the links to your forums. Again the title reads: go to forum. This is ridiculous!  All your forums have the same title of go to forum! change to

<a href="{parse url="showforum={$forum_data['id']}" seotitle="{$forum_data['name_seo']}" template="showforum" base="public"}" title='{$forum_data['name']}'>{$forum_data['name']}</a>

I will continue to show you other tips for optimizing your board index in the upcoming blog post but you still need to add contents to your board index. you need a short paragraph to tell your visitors what your board is all about and why they should join you (think keywords but don't stuff them and think like a salesperson) One way to do it is my notices system which allows you to add conditional notices on various location of IPB so you can enhance the text/content to code ratio of your board index page as well as other locations.

That's a wrap for today's blog post. if you have any comment or suggestion, please don't hesitate to

Enki