Establishing a Forum

Establishing a Forum

A forum is a great tool which can increase a hosting site’s link popularity and, more importantly, provides a value-adding community to visitors. Without mentioning the technical aspects of embedding a forum into a website, I shall explain the factors critical in the creation of a successful forum.

Read the full article here. Discuss the article in this thread.

I was wondering if you are familiar with any open source forum package whose links are search engine friendly?

Thanks in advance!

www.phpbb.com and www.invisionboard.com are just 2 of many free search-engine friendly forums that can be used 'out-of-the-box' or custom skinned. My preference and experience is with invisionboard, easy to install and modify and also search engine friendly.

Just remember that a dead or inactive forum is worse than no forum at all. If you do have a forum keep the number of subforums to a minimum and expand them as you grow.

Invisionboard & phpbb have very active support forums to help you install and build your own.

Php is great, but I'd highly recommend installing a hack for better crawling.

Nacho, what is the hack you are talking about? Thanks in advance,
Mitko @ WebSage

http://www.internet-marketing-resea...ftopic6374.html

that's a link to one that will work....i can't remember where the one i did is found, but basically, just google for "php session id hack" or something like that, and you'll find a lot of info

I was trying to read the article and neither link worked for me.

Are there any live sites using invision boards. I see most forums use phpBB or vBulletin and a lot of them saying license for vBulletin is worth it.

gnorb, or anyone else have any open source directory scripts that are SE friendly? We are using Links SQL on a site already and it works great, just trying to find something that is not $500 a pop.

highrankings forum (a SEO forum) uses invision

and google goes through my boards ever day. I do find messages on my boards in search engines all the time. Just not always stuff people would be looking for. I think Invision board is really easy to use. I am definitely an amateur and I haven't had any problems with it.

vB is unbelieveable for a website. I am certain it is helping my sites considerably. www.jrwrestling.com/forum gets spidered on a daily basis and it attracts spiders to my home pages and else where routinely now because of all the new content.