Making A Blog or Posting in Forums

[Jaecob]

Which is the most effective way to make my website known? I know that this is a very early question because I don't have my website yet. What are your experiences on these type of advertising?

[Harry]

Which is the most effective way to make my website known? I know that this is a very early question because I don't have my website yet. What are your experiences on these type of advertising?

Both are vital for branding your online presence. You can use fresh content to your blog which will attract search engine bots to crawl your website and posting in forums may help you to establish your brand in market.

[Jaecob]

I agree with you but I was thinking about the time. It will take time to do both so one of these would be enough I guess if it is done right.

I see forums as less important nowadays because of spams. Blogs are still read because of the information they provide so I think blog is better than forums for advertising.

[Pumazooma]

Forum software developers have done a lot in terms of spam prevention in the last few years. It's very easy now to be spam free hosting.

They're very useful in terms of advertising because you can link in your sig and post in boards where you have people interested in a similar subject so you're targetting the very people you're after. The posts are also being indexed a lot if it's a popular board.

Blogs are a lot more hands on from the one person running them to keep that flow of regular information going. Forums tend to be self sustaining by the members.

[Brandon]

What about doing both? You can make a blog to promote your website and participating on forums to promote your blog. I agree with Pumazooma. Running an establised forum with loyal members will enable you to get fresh content on a regular basis (daily or even more often).

[Harry]

Yeah, having both, active community forum and a fresh content blog will surely help us for attracting targeted traffic to our website. Try to use all helpful plugins ( eg SEO Plugins) which will boost SEO performance and hence the traffic to our website !

[Jaecob]

Glad to know about your insights. Both are really effective for SEO if they are done appropriately.

Where can I get these plug-ins that will help in SEO? Will I need to install different plug-ins depending on the kind of forum or can I use a single software for any forum platform?

[Harry]

Hi Jaecob, there are many SEO plugins which can be used to optimized your wordpress blog or discussion board. Few of them are as follows (SEO Plugins for Forum optimization) ::
# VBSEO plugin for vBulletin board.
# bbpress plugin: SEO Tools
# IPB SEO plugin module for IPB forum
# SEO-MOD for phpbb
and many more....

We had a very good list of SEO plugins for optimizing wordpress blog located at following link :: http://www.webhosting.uk.com/forums/...ss-plugin.html

[Pumazooma]

# SEO-MOD for phpbb

This does not actually enhance the SEO rating of phpBB posts/boards though. The URLs are already SEO friendly.

No one actually types in URLs any more so having a set of numbers or this_that.html at the end makes no odds and having 'key words' in the URL doesn't make it any better.

[Harry]

Thanks for update Pumazooma...
Personally i haven't tried 'SEO-MOD for phpbb'

[Jaecob]

Thanks for the list of SEO plug-ins. What I have to do now is to select the best forum and blog platform to use. Any recommendations on which forum platform I should use? I have to go with wordpress for my blog as I read many good reviews about it.

[Pumazooma]

Thanks for the list of SEO plug-ins. What I have to do now is to select the best forum and blog platform to use. Any recommendations on which forum platform I should use? I have to go with wordpress for my blog as I read many good reviews about it.

The best thing to do is to install something like XAMPP on your PC and install each of them and try the features out.

I've got several phpBB forums and I'm very happy with it. Other people like SMF, MyBB and vBulletin (although that's not free) etc etc. They're all similar and also different. The features are pretty common and they have different ways of adding modifications but they have different admin sections. You might like the way one board does things compared to another.

[synthesize]

When selecting the right platform for your forum, it's important to put yourself into your users' shoes. From the user point of view, I think either SMF, vBulletin or phpBb is a good and user friendly platform.