Forums And Blogs

The fact that blogs have become a major marketing tool is no longer news as of this page birthdate. Blogs are a fresh source of valuable content and updated information which is very themed to one particular niche.

Blogs are also a great source of the most powerful marketing concept online today which is user generated content that begets more content as it grows. Open conversation and replies to themed conversation makes for excellent spider food and creates a very useful way to get you site of ideas heavily saturated into the search engines.

When you couple this natural content concept with the fact that blog software like WordPress have been engineered to be extremely search engine friendly you end up with a powerful tool for marketing yourself and business online.

Blogs offer other desirable features built in for any website marketing project that are also useful, like RSS feed, ping and easy to add trackback links to threads.

If you are in a competitive or conversation inspiring market then a blog is likely a good idea for you to maintain. I personally expect almost every client I work with to try to build a blog or similar form of dynamic site content.

When A Marketing Forum Is Better

Perhaps the forum is the better choice for you though? A forum offer much in the same line of thought as a blog does in concept. A forum allows you a content rich discussion area on any site with little setup required, but a forum does more still. When working with a forum you have the ability to better optimize the threads to each stand on their own for different targeted subjects. I find forums a great way to cover a wder range and get more feedback that can be indexed in search engines than a blog provides.

The most common forum software available is likely PHPBB because of its free proce tag. PHPBB is an excellent and reasonibly secure free forum software that is not to hgard to customize or optimize for search engines. The fact that PHPBB has such a long history means there are seemingly endless PHPBB themes and PHPBB mods available for free on the web.

The best place on the web to see the free PHPBB themes and skins is at PHPBBhacks.com
Free PHPBB themes

Blog and Forum SEO

While wordpress and typepad are pretty out of the box ready for google to index with good success, PHPBB may require a bit more to get the search listings you hope for with each and every thread and discussion.

We have an addition topic of the day tip on how to optimize your wordpress titles here that is a good read if you have a wordpress blog.

Also check out our latest guest contribution on how to optimize a blog written with wordpress here.

Read more about search engine optimization for PHPBB here.