SEO] Increase the traffic of your MyBB forums

by **Adminkunlex** Mon Sep 09, 2019 6:36 am

Who doesn't want better traffic for his own forums ?
Not you of course
To attract more people you must follow before everything the basics of #SEO optimization.: Adding meta tags
They are HTML tags you must include your head tags
(<head></head>) of each page.
In MyBB, the head tags content is generated by the template "headerinclude" which is inside "Ungrouped
Templates" of your "XXX Templates" (XXX = your
theme's name), you must go to "Style & Templates"
in Admin Panel. Then you insert this code :
Code:
<meta name="title" content="YOUR FORUMS TITLE">
<meta name="description" content="DESCRIPTION OF
YOUR FORUMS">
<meta name="keywords" content="TAGS, KEYWORDS
SEPARATED BY COMMA">
<meta name="language" content="English">
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">

Creating a "robots.txt" file
Web site owners use the /robots.txt file to giv
instructions about their site to web robots; this is called The Robots Exclusion Protocol .
It works likes this: a robot wants to vists a Web site URL, say https://9jabaze.forumotion.com/ .
Before it does so, it firsts checks for http://9jabaze.fnrumotion.com/robots.txt , and finds:
Code:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
The "User-agent: *" means this section applies to all
robots. The "Disallow: /" tells the robot that it should not visit any pages on the site.
You must upload the robots.txt to the root directory of your forums.
Examples of robots.txt :
Code:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Disallow: /inc/
Disallow: /admin/
Sitemap: https://9jabaze.forumotion.com/sitemap.xml

Creating a Sitemap
In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for your forums along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site. You must upload the sitemap.xml to the root directory of your forums.
Examples of Sitemap generators :
Code:
https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
http://www.xsitemap.com/
https://smallseotools.com/xml-sitemap-generator/

Submit your forums link to search engines
How will Google or Bing know your forums ? They aren't there to help you without any effor from your part, you must go yourself in google or bing webmaster tools submit your forums link and add your sitemap.
Google => https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url
Bing => https://www.bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url
Others => https://www.entireweb.com/free_submission/

Make your forums rich in content
We must note that the most important factor is the
high quality content of your forums.
Why users will browse your forums instead of other ones, if they are richer in content and more helpful while you both discuss the main domain of activity (for example, both of you talk about graphics) ?
Your forums must be not only rich in content, but
unique, sharing stuffs users won't find on any other forums.