SMF Tips, Mods and Tricks

I'll show you several ways to Make your SMF Forum Search Engine Friendly.




Normally, Smf forums are not, but here are a few tips necessary.

URLs

Search engines really value a more descriptive URL. By default, SMF uses URL’s that are SEO useless. I'll introduce you to an SMF mod, called Pretty URLs, it would re-write your forums URL for a search engine to readilly visit. Pretty URLs is very simple to install.

Notice the difference below

(these links all go to the same post):

Default SMF URLs: http:// www.cyvin.com/index.php?topic=2969.0

Search Engine Friendly URLs: http:// www.cyvin.com/index.php/topic,2969.0.html

Pretty URLs: http://www.cyvin.com/offtopic/unleaded-gas/

Pretty URLs use the title of the post topic as part of the URL. This will help in search engines optimization.



Robots

With robots, search engines won't penalize you thinking a thread pages are different topics. Set your Robots.txt as follows.


: User-agent:
* Disallow: /*?action*
Disallow: /*sort=*
Disallow: /*msg*

H1 Tags

Next is the H1 tag. Like the URL, H1 tags are used heavily by search engines to classify the content on a page. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to do this with a mod. It requires some modification of the theme you are using.


Meta Tags


Meta tags are used heavily by search Engines to classify webpages. To edit your meta tag, edit the "index.template.php" file to describe the site. Users of SMF version 2 can use the vBulletin Style Meta Tags mod to update the tags based on the thread that a person views.

Please hit the Like button if this helped.