What "seo" improvements have you done to your site?

What have you done to your forum or website to help it's overall "SEO"?
Have you ever made changes to improve your SEO that later hurt your rankings or traffic?
What advice to you have for new forum owners?

 

Wrote similar topics with a different spin, updated the keywords to less competitive or search friendly ones and corrected minor spelling and grammatical mistakes.

 

SEO is over-rated. If you're in a competitive niche you're not going to move up the food chain by wasting money on SEO. If you're in a non-competitive niche you don't need SEO. You need quality original content. Google has a system in place and it cannot be defeated by either blackhat or whitehat SEO. They will, in fact, blacklist sites making a conscious effort to in crease pagerank through artificial means. I've wasted money on vBSEO and any number of other programs that did absolutely nothing other than increase the number of spiders crawling my site. When you're in a niche with thousands of competing sites, that's useless.

Here are a few things that work:

1) quality original content - this means writing it yourself from scratch, not rewriting something someone else wrote that has already been indexed by the major search engines. Google only recognizes the first work on a subject as the original. It recognizes every duplicate story on the same topic as content theft.
2) accurate and descriptive titles - Who, What, When, Where, Why, How
3) keywords - unique keywords that are accurate to the content. Overused keywords such as "sports" or "law" don't help.
4) hashtags - create hashtags unique to your site and use them religiously. Put your stamp on all of your content.
5) backlinks from quality sites with high pagerank - Sites with pageranks of 5 and higher are more trusted by Google in re to which sites they link.

Here are a few things that will screw you:

1) copy and paste material - excessive claims of "fair use" of material from other sites is a huge no-no. It will get you blacklisted from search engines.
2) excessive garbage threads and posts - quality content is far more important than quantity of content. Don't post crap just to add content.
3) excessive outbound links - Don't link to every site under the sun. A balance between incoming links and outgoing links is important.
4) misleading or inaccurate titles - Don't make threads that say things like "See Angelina Jolie Naked!" unless that is the actual content.
5) fake keywords - Don't keyword threads with #scarlettjohanssen when the content is completely irrelevant to Scarlett Johanssen.
6) bogus hashtags - Don't hashtag threads with hashtags known to be in use by other sites.
7) backlinks from garbage sites - Don't post links to your site on sites with low pagerank or questionable content. It will hurt you.

There's another list entirely for Google Adwords and other advertising. But in short ...

Do all of the above, and NEVER pay for fake members, fake content, fake backlinks, or fake clicks on your ads. All are a death sentence.

 

Well, my website was on wordpress and a few weeks back it was all hacked and unfortunately the server's hard disk crashed too (at least that is what the providers said) and I lost my content and whatever else was there on the site (though I have my backups). Unfortunately, I did not want to get back to theming on wordpress again and gave my website a simple static set of pages now. as this was done in haste, most of it is not yet optimized - onPage. So I have to do that first - maybe put up the title properties, alt tags and other stuff. Once done, I would revert back to the traditional ways - postings, commenting, articles and yes, this time I do want to learn about social bookmarking too.

 

In blogger blogs it is quite easy to modify them and make them more appealing to search engines. For instance, I have edited tags, removed uselss widgets and so on. I have also put effort in the keyword density but I don't know if it has a huge impact on SEO anymore.

 

I don't think so it will have some bad impact on seo because if you keep on modifying your accounts then definitely you may get good results and your content will be updated.

 

I've made a few adjustments based on what I've read, other than that I've just tried building backlinks and posting decent quality content on the forum.

 

For my WordPress sites, I design all my themes from scratch, so I just factor any SEO considerations into them in the design phase. For my forums? Don't really do much SEO wise. Never needed it, my site either succeeds or fails based on my effort/lack of effort from what I can tell.

 

I adjusted my meta words so google can recognize the sites niche, i've put my site onto google and bings webmaster tools thing which has been pretty good for me, i'm working on a sitemap for the forum

 

I find IPB's out of the box configuration (with rewritten URLs turned on) to be very effective.

 

I added an introduction box for guests on my community. Figured I'd do that to try to help our serps.

 

So many things to enlist here. I paid for some professional SEO advice. Here are few of the things I did -

1.) Make it clutter free.

2.) Simple design.

3.) Installed SEO Presser.

4.) No pop-ups or any other irksome ads for that matter.

5.) Bought PR9 backlinks from Warrior forums.

6.) B ought 2,00 Facebook likes from Fiverr.

7.) Wiser use of keywords.

8.) Mobile-friendly design.

to name a few.

 

I've done that too. I've also written a lot of unique content for my forum, including reviews of sites in my niche.

 

Excuse my ignorance, but I don't quite understand what you meant. Adding an introduction box? Can you delineate please?