The some clever cookie thought up things like dynamic meta descriptions

<meta name=”description” content=”<?php echo $ProductName . ‘ available in bulk online for free home delivery. Also view our other ‘ . $CategoryName . ‘ products and ‘ . $PromotionName . ‘ deals! ‘ . $ProductName . ‘ from ‘ . $SiteName; ?>” />

Now the actual php there might not be perfect, I’m not a php wizard (yet) – but you get the idea. As such it’s now also possible to put in a blanket dynamic rule to cover all your bases on large sites, and then you can go back and overwrite any important products with static handwritten content.

<?php
if (isset($StaticDesc)) {
echo $StaticDesc;
} else {
echo $ProductName . ‘ available in bulk online for free home delivery. Also view our other ‘ . $CategoryName . ‘ products and ‘ . $PromotionName . ‘ deals! ‘ $ProductName . ‘ from ‘ . $SiteName;
}
?>

Again, just to give you an idea – any php wizards reading please leave me a comment if any code amendments should be made!

A forum is one of the largest types of site in terms of pages that you can apply an SEO skin to, and a forum is also potentially an extremely valuable SEO resource because visitors build up hand written content for you every single day.

So Let’s Get Started

For specific examples I’m referring to phpBB3 – as that’s what I’m working with on the newly launched Digital Designer Forum pictured below.

The first and foremost concern for any forum is the url structure. By default all the forum applications that I know of are set to domain.com/forum.php?id=4 or similar – which obviously isn’t much benefit in terms of targetting keyphrases. Ideally we’d like to have domain.com/forum-title.htm and domain.com/thread-title.htm etc.

Setting Up URL Rewrites

Now, phpBB-SEO.com offer some really great tools to help you with this – the first one to have a look at (in the downloads section in the left hand navigation) is the Advanced phpBB SEO mod rewrite package, which you can download directly from the site, and contains a full set of instructions for modifying existing files, or, if you haven’t modified any of your phpBB3 files then you can simply overwrite your existing files with the premodified ones in the package.

This is a really really great module, once installed you get a whole new tab on your admin interface which allows you to control exactly how you want your url’s to be rewritten (though obviously mod rewrite needs to be enabled on your server, which it usually is by default). Once it’s all set up it will dynamically generate your .htaccess file which you can simply copy, paste, save, and upload. Though it’d be nice if they included a feature like wordpress where it updates itself as long as your .htaccess file is writeable.

Once that’s all done you should have nice clean URLs like domain.com/my-first-forum-f1.html the f1 on the end is the forum code and can’t be changed, it’s used as the ‘trigger’ to actually find the correct page!

But now we have a problem, domain.com/forum.php?id=1 and domain.com/my-first-forum-f1.html are both accessible….. duplicate content!

Setting Up 301 Redirects

Thankfully phpBB-seo.com being the clever cookies that they are, and very much up to scratch on their SEO Skillz have realised this problem – and provided a solution.

With a few more clicks (and a couple of code modifications of your existing forum files) you can install the phpBB SEO Zero Duplicate module, which will redirect all unrewritten URL’s to their appropriate rewritten counterparts. The module also recognises when forums/threads/posts have changed name/url and updates appropriately, though this is not something I’ve tested yet.

Sort Out Those Page Titles

I don’t think that I need to preach any further about how important page titles are, so let’s just get right to it: phpBB-SEO offer two ways of doing this, one is a dynamic meta content generator that puts together content based on the frequency of used words on the page to analyse what the page is about. This sounded a little too vague and inhuman to me so I opted for option B on Digital Designer Forum, which is the ‘Optimal Titles’ module.

Essentially all that it does is strip out all the useless stuff that phpBB puts in there by default; ‘view forum’ and ‘view thread’ being the most common culprites, it instead leaves you with clean (almost too clean) page titles that reflect the name of the forum/thread and will also add page numbers appropriately to cut down on duplicate titles.

One thing that this module doesn’t do is provide you with an adequate homepage title, though you can edit this yourself by doing a sitewide search for ‘Index Page’ which should bring up root/acp/common.php where the index page title is defined – just change it to whatever you like and you’re set.

Get A Working XML Sitemap and RSS Feeds

Having an XML sitemap that’s validated by Google Webmaster Tools is one of the best things that you can do for your site. The GYM Sitemaps module, again by phpBB-SEO.com, is very nice little badger that generates a valid XML sitemap for your forum AND keeps it fully updated with every new forum and thread that gets updated to your site.

This same module also adds a series of RSS feeds to the footer links of your site, so that your visitors can subscribe to a main feed or any of the corresponding individual forum feeds! – VERY handy.

In Conclusion

That’s pretty much it really, just keep doing the obvious, name all the forums relevant things and add the usual canonical URL issue resolution to the .htaccess file.

Any more tips for optimising phpBB3 or your own experiences – drop me a line in the comments!

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You want to rename /portfolio.htm to /wedding-photographer-portfolio.htm but currently your indexed page in Google links to /portfolio.htm and if you delete this page, anyone who finds you in a search engine will simply be given a 404 (not found) error when they click on your site. You can’t leave the page in place and set the new one live as well, or the old page will never be un-indexed, and the new one will never be indexed for the first time because it has the same content.

So what do you do?

You use 301 Redirects.

What is a Redirect?

Redirects come in two main forms, a 302 redirect (temporary), or a 301 redirect (permanent). Essentially a redirect tells any traffic to the url you specify to move on to a new page, it ‘redirects’ it. (see how that works?).
In the case of a 301 redirect, users are automatically taken to the new page, whereas search engines are informed that this page has moved to a new location, and that they should re-index the new URL.

How do I use a 301 Redirect?

There are many ways of implementing 301 redirects, from using server side scripting (eg php headers), Meta Refresh headers, Javascript Redirects, Frame Redirects, Redirect Loops, or my personal preference, which is the server side scripting in the form of an .htaccess redirect (for Apache) and http.ini redirect (for ISAPI).

If you’re using a Linux based server then setting up a 301 redirect is probably a lot simpler than you might imagine.

• Create a new blank file, and save it as .htaccess
• Then in the first (or any) lines of the file write:

### 301 Redirects
Redirect 301 /oldpage.htm http://www.example.com/newpage.htm

The first line is simply a comment, so you can structure your .htaccess file when it’s getting full of things.

The second line consists of the following elements:

• Redirect 301

Tells the server what type of rule this is

• /oldpage.htm

Tells the server which page you are moving

• http://www.example.com/newpage.htm

Tells the server where the page is being moved to

Considerations

It should be noted that in order to comply with HTTP web standards, the location of where the page is being moved to must be an absolute URI (ie. it must have http://www.example.com/newpage.htm – and not just /newpage.htm)
Some browsers will let this slide if you forget to do it, but others will display a warning message to the user.

That’s all!

So if you want to get cracking with renaming some of your files to make better use of key phrases but don’t want to lose your indexed pages in Google – you now have your solution! Get to work!

Got any nifty 301 Redirect tricks? Drop me a line in the comments!

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