I own a small number of forums and have spent countless hours experimenting and testing different ways to increase traffic levels from the search engines – especially Google. After many hours of experimentation I’ve found three tactics that consistently work, and more importantly they work together! These tactics do not cover basic forum SEO, such as removing session ids, SEOing URLs, etc, which can be found elsewhere.

Tactic #1: Reduce Thread Click-Distance with Mini Site-Maps
To understand the importance of click-distance reads Quadz post here. Most established forums have hundreds, thousands and some possibly tens of thousands of quality threads. But, the majority of those quality threads are buried deep within the forums and so require visitors to click numerous links to reach them. Likewise, the search-engines spiders have to dig deep to find them too. Indeed, Quadz demonstrated, which I have replicated, that click distance affects ranking. Here’s Quadz definition of click distance:

“Click distance is the minimum number of clicks it would take you to get from one page to another. During the experiment, the click distance from the home page to any post (or from one post to another) was 1.” 

If click distance affects page ranking, then reducing it should help page ranking! One way to achieve this is to include a forum site map with links to all quality threads. However, you can imagine such a site map may contain thousands/tens of thousands of links, which is not ideal as the SE’s webmaster’s guidelines make it quite clear that they prefer a limited number of links per page – certainly not many hundreds or thousands. But, the way round this is to use a series of mini site maps, where each site-map contains only 100 – 200 links.

For instance, in the footer of a forum, include something like:

[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][]17][18][19][20][[21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50]…

Each number links to a mini site-map containing 100 – 200 quality-thread links. Obviously, you wouldn’t do this manually; there are numerous site-map mods available for most forum types. So, it’s a simple matter of modifying them to generate mini site-maps instead of one large one. I’ll include my phpBB2 script on this blog soon. You’ll find after employing this tactic, that it really does assist deeper indexing by the SE spiders.

Tactic #2: Keyword Optimize Quality Threads
As mentioned above, established forums have hundreds, thousands and possibly tens of thousands of quality threads. When a member of a forum creates a new thread, he/she does not think about what keywords to target or post keyword-density. He simply creates a new thread and other members contribute to the thread.

The SE algorithms use many factors to rank pages, but, the most important factor is obviously keywords. For instance, it’s unlikely you’ll rank a page for a mortgage-related term unless you use that term on the page, etc. Similarly, a page from a forum thread won’t rank for specific keywords unless they’re used on the page, etc.

So, after reducing click distance (tactic #1), quality threads need to be keyword optimized so they rank for specific terms. How do you do this? Simple, edit the threads! Edit or change the title and the individual thread-posts to include long-tail keywords related to your forum niche – but don’t overdo keyword density. This may sound unethical, but it’s not. If you’re worried about upsetting forum members by modifying their posts, PM them first and you’ll be surprised how flattered they feel!

Tactic #3: Blog and Promote Quality Threads
So, after reducing click-distance with mini site-maps and keyword optimizing quality threads, you’re ready to pass on link love to those threads to get them moving up the SERPs. I’ve found the easiest way to do this is to create a blog on a sub-domain of the main forum. Something like myblog.myforum.com. Modify the blog’s theme so it reflects the forum’s look and feel and ensure the blog is registered with the most popular RSS aggregators.

The purpose of the blog is to promote forum threads. So, every other day or so write a small post about a number of threads and include the relevant thread links and appropriate anchor text, then submit the blog post to Digg, Netscape and other social bookmarking sites. Don’t worry about votes, you don’t need them! Popular bookmarking sites carry a huge amount trust, and having any links from them is beneficial! Keep on blogging and promoting, and within a few weeks you’ll start to see the fruits of your labour!

Yes, the above tactics require some hard-work. But, if they are applied aggressively, they could dramatically increase forum traffic levels in about 6 – 8 weeks. I know, I’ve done it several times!