Lets face it, when was the last time you searched on Google or Yahoo? 2 hours ago? 30 minutes? Just like these search engines can provide you with information on your favorite movie, they can also provide you with free traffic to your forum.

This is the reason behind our recent forum optimization project. Due to the overwhelming amount of content, poor link structure, and session issues, forums tend to preform worse than normal websites in search engines. Having said that, with some key optimizations and upgrades you can make those issues a thing of the past.

Thanks to a mod from phpBB SEO, as well as some in house modifications, we were able to make some key adjustments across the network which will help search engines better crawl and index your content. The result? You should see more of your pages indexed and thus more people coming to your forum.

As always, the best way to get people to your forum is through quality content. Below we’ve listed a few tips to help put search to work for you:

1) Edit your META tags – We have a custom mod in your admin panel that lets you edit your META tags. Editing these can help search engines understand what your forum is about.
2) Use a targeted header – Instead of naming your forum “The best forum ever” consider naming it “Forums for Wrestling and WWE Fanatics”
3) Be descriptive – Try to encourage your members to be more descriptive when posting a topic. Instead of “Cool thing I found” have them make the subject “Seagate Readies New Hard Drive Technology”.
4) Link to your forum – Relevant sites linking to yours not only bring a lot of traffic, but can also help with search engine.
5) Be patient – Traffic from search isn’t going to come in the first few weeks or months. It may take time but it will be worth the long term results you reap.

When we launched our Ad-Sharing update which made sponsors default on all forums, we promised the revenue would “allow us to improve on the already high level of services”. We’re pleased to say that we’ve done just that:

We’ve run into a few problems over the past few months with web servers going down here and there. This was caused by an uneven distribution in load caused by using Round robin to balance the traffic. Round robin randomly selects from a pool of IP addresses and that is the server you land on. Problem here is that there is no load distribution and there is no failover protection.

The solution to this was simple, in theory; however, it would take time to test and develop and a lot of money to purchase the equipment. After consulting various network engineers, we looked into the Zeus ZXTM Load Balancer. Zeus ZXTM is a software suit that distributes requests for various TCP and UDP services based on specifications that you set for it.

What Zeus ZXTM would give us is a level of stability and redundancy on our web servers that has never been seen before by FreeForums.org and its users. By sending all requests to the Zeus ZXTM load balancing server, we are able to evenly distribute all requests over all web servers as well as redirect requests when a web server goes offline. This will make it impossible for a failed web server to ever be noticed by our viewers.

We made the final purchase this past Tuesday and all viewers are accessing FreeForums.org by way of the Zeus ZXTM load balancer. We couldn’t be happier

As you probably know by now, we recently launched a blog hosting service. One of the main features (and what makes it’s 100% unique from other blogging platforms) is your blog will share members with your forum. If a member registers on your forum they can use the same login for your blog, and vice versa.

Blogs are a great resource for building your community as they allow you to interact with your user. You can use blogs to post news about your community, share articles you found, or allow key members and staff to post as well.

What are you waiting for? If you already have a forum, you can go to your Community Control Panel and enable a blog. Your login was emailed to you with the subject “Your Community Control Panel login”. Additionally, if you want a personal blog or something not connected to your forum you can go to UnrealBlogs.com and create a new one.

We’ve found blogging to be a blast, and you will too