Hey Forum Owners…

Don’t forget to enter Meta Keywords, Descriptions and certainly Forum Name in your forum software setup options. Yes, it’s true that there’s a million different ways to do SEO. And there’s tons of online tutorials, books, reports, etc. on SEO. No one thing is likely to magically move you to the top of various search engine results. And even among experts, there’s heated debate as to just what those things are. Still, there’s some basic items that are obvious in terms of needing to be done. And that have value in and of themselves regardless of their SEO juice.

As we index the forum space here at Twing.com, making forum search better and more available to all, we’ve noticed a fair amount of boards / forums are missing this basic information

Most will say things like keywords don’t matter to search engines. Which may or may not be true. But you never know what these will be useful for. Perhaps even for use with an internal search engine one day; or a new search engine. But either way, Meta descriptions are useful. Search engines will often use these as descriptions, even if the content itself only affects relevancy ranking in trivial ways. Some search engines use snippets of text from individual screens as results. In these cases, maybe the description doesn’t mean so much.

But here’s the main points:

• You don’t really know how this meta information may be used.
• In some cases it might help.
• In no cases, (that I’m aware of anyway), will it hurt. (Unless perhaps you do something spammy in there.)
• It does not take much time to implement.

So do yourselves and your users a favor. Take 5 - 10 minutes to re-visit your basic Meta information settings and adjust as necessary. You’ll be glad you did!