Forum for ranking and conversions

Forums is a great tool/platform to have on almost any website for the following reasons:

1. It’s easy to install with open source applications like phpbb, bbpress. Even the paid ones like vbulletin, invision forums are easy to start with. For ASP and JSP there are some good forums too.
2. It doesn’t hurt at all (except few examples).
3. It is such a great platform to make anyone participate on your website. One forum installation with few categories will make many participate. They feel the ownership with an empowered forum.
4. 
   Forum can generate great content. Oprah’s community section pages are contributing 117k out of 188k, http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Aoprah.com%2Fcommunity&btnG=Search.
5. This expands your marketing team. Just imagine a community of over 100k bringing 1 person each week, its about 100k potential customers every week for no efforts of yours.

Forums are highly search engine friendly

1. Most of the search engines are able to understand the template part and the content part of the forums. So a page with over 10 discussions can contribute great content for search engine.
2. Also the secret lies in one word “non-commercial content”. Since the forum content is considered to be non-commercial, people do refer to this page and websites refer WITH JUICY LINKS.
3. The recent Google SERPs have started showing forum snippets with data and total replies (Something like “2 posts – 1 author – Last post: 30 Aug 2007″). This may be increasing the CTR for forum pages under SERP.
4. With all these great links coming to the forums, it increases the site’s value as the links are getting distributed across the pages. It also reduces the risk that is created by link building.
5. Long tail: It targets the long tail keywords really well. A forum with 1,00,000 pages and each page bringing 1 visitor a day is bringing 1,00,000 visitor every day. Get 1,00,000 visitors consistently for a keyword is very difficult but getting 1,00,000 visitors for over 100k pages is an easy task.
6. Last 2 secrets (Lead for upcoming markets): It helps you take the lead for the latest markets. Example: Recently someone mentioned a word on national TV and a community member came over to our forums and put this question “What is ******** Technique?”. It was a pure self made word by the the famous doctor. But this discussion grew and got many links in no time. Also the market for the new word was on raise and our client’s page became the center for all. This was bring a great amount of traffic and more importantly a great number of participants.
7. Last 2 secrets (Recommendations): Recommendations are as sexy as searches. A forum enables you to get high quality recommendations. (that is a good enough hint)

Forum, Easy part: Traffic, Difficult part: conversions

It is easy to get traffic to these forum pages but really difficult to get them converted. I am sharing 3 tips that can improve your conversions from forums.

1. Let not forum pages rank: Forum pages are good for ranking but really bad for a new visitor as the answers are hidden deep inside somewhere.
   • Create a different article as a summary of all the forum post (Even you can go for an in-forum summary post, where you have a section that summarizes the discussions on the top of the discussion).
   • Next step, use canonical tag for all the similar posts and point it to the above article.
   • Link all the forum posts to the article (that will pass all the link juice to the article page).

   This will ensure that your right page is coming in a ranking where you can do A/B and multi-variant testings.

2. Having relevant ads inside the forums. Putting customized ads for the forum pages that are bringing good traffic has proven to be conversion friendly. Example: A forum discussion on canonical tag can have an ad
   

   “Need help with canonical tag implementations? Our team has implemented canonical tags for many cms that are used by over a million users. Click here to contact us for a detailed talk. Let’s empower our websites in Search engine rankings.”

3. Using community members as affiliate partners. Offer your community members an incentive to bring more POTENTIAL visitors. At times even you can allow the community members to sign up for people who are not that computer friendly. This can also improve the sales. (DO THIS ONLY IF YOUR PRODUCTS ARE GOOD FOR PEOPLE else the community members will feel betrayed)

6 quick tips for forum optimization

1. Title rocks: Have 2 titles, one title of the forum discussions (as you don’t want to change the titles added by your community members), and other title for the page (This is what rocks with search engines, so make it really optimized from search engines point of view).
2. h1 tag Have the title of the forum discussions as an h1 tag. I have seen that many of the forums are using bigger fonts instead of h1 tag. h1 tags is more a document tag than display tag. [A little secret: Consider changing the title of the forum discussions in SE-friendly manner after some time, when the forum discussion becomes dead, this helps in getting better ranks].
3. Interlinking of pages: Interlinking of pages with the right anchor text can help beyond the imagination. With 1000s of forum pages having the target keyword can do wonders.
4. Content optimization: Do considering decorating the forum contents with proper bold, italics and other tags highlighting the keywords.
5. Template optimization: Keep the template light and in a proper structure so that Search engines can differentiate the content and the template. Also it is advisable to inform the search engines about the application that is used for your forums as they have specific algorithms to detect template and content for commonly used applications.
6. Connecting with social networks: Motivate, teach and inspire your community members to spread the NON-COMMERCIAL forum discussions across the social media. This can help you get a lot of quality links and relevant traffic. Make the connection easy with tools and applications.

Community management is a whole different challenge and I count myself lucky to be associated with large communities for many years.

Tags: community, conversion, forum, forum optimization, SEO, traffic