Setting up a forum

[frostyx]

Greetings,

My company has decided to set up a forum and I was wondering what would be the most search engine friendly way of doing this?

Some things that we are discussing are buying another domain name and using that to run the forum with links back to our company site or setting it up as a subdomain of the existing site.

Any input would be appreciated. Thanks!

[incrediblehelp]

I would run the forum under your main domain name.

Check out PHPBB

[jayvee73uk]

This site uses phpBB and so do my forums and I reccomend them for your needs
Also check out my forum below

[frostyx]

Yes I was planning on using phpbb but I was interested in the best way to set up the forum and why (main domain, subdomain, new domain).

[collusion]

I use Simple Machines alot. No matter what forum you use, they tend to have search engine friendly URL options. With a Mod Rewrite you can have the filenames be the same as the title of the post. I just put them in a subdir such as /"keyword"_forum

[Daniel Alan]

I would say whatever you decide to go for, try to keep it as simple as possible.

Personally I would say run it under your main domain.

Good luck!

[collusion]

If they have a current website then running a forum under the main directory may overwrite files. Not only index and other page names but images also.

[Steven1976a]

Hi Frostyx

Can I ask what the forum will be for? I have seen some companies in our industry set up forums for customers to post comments and it was probably the worst thing they ever did. Whilst some people will say some nice things other less satisfied customers have gone on to the forum and given their company a right roasting for everyone to see.

Just a thought if you sell products online.

[cutiger95]

I would personally set-up your forum on a secondary domain with links back to your site. Forums are indexed and spidered exceedingly well.

My suggestion for installing the Forum further is to find someone who has installed a phpBB forum before and optimized it for the internet. Start out by looking up Chuck Crawford. He has installed several phpBB forums for me and they all rank very well in Google and the other search engines naturally.

However the phpBB installation that he did is very heavily modified.

[kgun]

Originally Posted by frostyx

Greetings,

My company has decided to set up a forum and I was wondering what would be the most search engine friendly way of doing this?

Some things that we are discussing are buying another domain name and using that to run the forum with links back to our company site or setting it up as a sub domain of the existing site.

Any input would be appreciated. Thanks!

My bolding:

Getting a good social network and members that write good content. I have my own forum, ForumNorway that I think is good enough. Be prepared for much spam, that may degrade your forum if you do not do it correct from the beginning. Set up a firewall around your forum from the very start.

For more specific SEO purposes, you should:

• Choose forum categories carefully. That may be the most important SEO part. That is IMO much more important than choosing the correct technology. Think of it: You get unique forum categories on your forum. That may bring much traffic if that is what you want.
• Write good forum TOS from the very beginning to target your forum to the right community.
• Especially write an announcement and write about it in the forum rules (see the rules on my forum for an example) hoe important it is to select post headings carefully.

If you need more advice, you can sign up with my msn messenger at skupot at hotmail dot com. I can give you some minutes when I have time.

[juliemarg]

Originally Posted by Steven1976a

Hi Frostyx

Can I ask what the forum will be for? I have seen some companies in our industry set up forums for customers to post comments and it was probably the worst thing they ever did. Whilst some people will say some nice things other less satisfied customers have gone on to the forum and given their company a right roasting for everyone to see.

Just a thought if you sell products online.

I'm with Steven. The slam nature of the internet is that most everyone seems to have something bad to say about everybody else. If I google a decent restaurant in town, I'll see multiple posts about how bad it is. The anonymity of the internet seems to give some otherwise wimpy people alot of courage.

[frostyx]

Thanks a lot for the input guys, I think we are going to be going in a different direction after all.