Forum vs CMS for articles

[Zagis]

What would be the best choice for article writing, a CMS or a Forum thread?

[FightRice]

I use a CMS, give a little better control of the layout and other stuff though a forum thread will work equally as well

[amenadiel]

Thing is, a CMS is better prepared to handle things such as article pagination and automatic list generation, not to mention a more appealing look and feel. In terms of indexing tho, I believe it's pretty much the same.

[terrymason]

take a look at GARS from thevbgeek.com

It is an article system for your forum.

[Joe Ward]

I think the better appearance of the CMS article will help capture user attention better, potentially helping to reduce your bounce rate, by improving upon the immediate impression you made on the user.

[Zagis]

I see...

What about SEO? Are there any pros/cons?

Thank you

[Joe Ward]

In terms of SEO, you have full control over what is contained within the article, which links are created, etc. Threads grow dynamically, and the content will change as follow up posts are made.

So SEO for threads results in long tail search optimization potentially generating traffic for thousands of keywords. Articles, on the other hand, are less in volume, and can be used to directly target specific terms.

As a forum owner, you will likely see most traffic from your threads in total. But you might be able to have some success getting traffic for particular terms using carefully crafted articles, combined with a building solid links to them.

[terrymason]

I'm not an expert, but I don't think an out of the box cms is good for SEO. I think your front page with have a calendar and a poll on the left side (where googlebot will likely see it first). I also don't think that alot of detailed forum stats, or who is online should be displayed.

I think you can fix this by a few tweaks. I would suggest not showing the calendar at all, and only showing who's online, the stats, and maybe the poll to registered members. That way search engines will concentrate on the meat of your forum / articles.

[Joe Ward]

I agree. When I refer to the SEO benefits of CMS pages, I mean specifically:

• You have full control over what is written, so you can carefully construct the content and links.
• Your content cannot be changed by follow up user posts.

However, I definitely do not recommend filling your CMS pages up with unnecessary widgets like calendars, etc. In fact, always thinking "keep it simple and clean". Remove anything that not going to make your content more SEO optimized or significantly improved for user friendliness/value added.

[amenadiel]

When we say CMS, I'm thinking wordpress, which has built in SEOed URLS, tags, pagination and such.

Of course, there are other CMS, but for "frontpage" purposes I believe it's better to keep it simple and clean.

[briansol]

I simply use a category set on my forums for my articles.

[Joe Ward]

I like the approach this forum takes for the homepage:
http://www.earnersforum.com/

It's very similar to Sitepoint:
SitePoint : New Articles, Fresh Thinking for Web Developers and Designers