Forum homepage seo

[fernandose]

Hi,
Im thinking that a a frontpage is needed for my forum, as currently my forum is the index of my site. By frontpage, i mean it being very similar to slyck.com, in the way they have news as their main focus, last post modules etc..

In order to do this I could use vbadvanced, but don't really like the way the styling is incoperated from the forum theme. nothing stands out as everything looks the same.

Or I can manually code a frontpage grabbing all the data i want into a html.

Whats best for seo purposes and is adding a frontpage likely to affect my seo ranks?

[Joe Ward]

Adding a front page can be a good idea, because you can customize it based on your own strategy.

We use vBAdvanced here, but it too significant work to get our homepage looking the way it does.

The best part about the site you mentioned is that featured items at the top. This is great because it directs attention immediately to some of the most interesting topics, allowing you to keep your visitors better (reducing your homepage bounce rate).

The feature box on cnet.com is one of my favorite homepage widgets:
Product reviews and prices, software downloads, and tech news - CNET

You could create a customer page, or place another CMS in front of the forum, or a blog such as WordPress. Each would require some level of customization.

vBA might be easiest to quickly setup and have matching your site template. However, to make it look nice requires much additional effort.

[fernandose]

Thanks you offered some great tips.

What ill do is try and see what I can do with vbadvanced and if I can't, Ill manually create a nice index page.

However what do you think about seo purposes when adding a frontpage?

[Joe Ward]

Using your forumhome (i.e. list of sub-forums & recent posts) as your homepage creates good links to the sub-forums, but the links content changes frequently as new posts get listed in each sub-forum, and the page typically does not include good *volume* content. That is, you have all kinds of links but no text like that of an article.

Therefore, by creating a homepage you have a great opportunity to write some introductory text that excites your visitors, gets loaded with strategy keywords, links to your carefully selected (and most important) sub-forums directly, and also links directly to articles or threads you are trying to optimize, etc.

Overall, it is a very good idea. However, stay away from adding all kinds of extra widget content that will cloud the page with extra stuff that will either have no benefit or take away from SEO.