Useful SEO Mods for Simple Machines Forum

SMF is one of the best Open Source community software available on the internet and by using suitable mods, you can squeeze more functionalities out of your forum. Let’s check out in this post, some SEO Mods that may help you in improving your forum rankings in search results:

1. Optimus Brave

This mod allows you to add proper Meta Name Description to your Forum. It is capable of automatically making First Line of any topic or thread as its meta description.

It can also make default description of a board as its meta description and allows you to insert descriptive meta tags to your Forum Homepage.

Using this mod, you can also add verification Meta Tags, which is quite useful when you are verifying your Website in Google Webmasters Tools, Bing Webmasters, Yandex and Alexa:

And if you would like to create a robots.txt file for your forum, which tells search engine bots what to crawl and what to ignore?, then this mod is also capable of creating one:

Overall, Optimus Brave is a must have mod for every webmaster running SMF. You can read more about this mod here

2. Anti-SID canonical tag

SMF uses PHP Session ID to keep browsing session of your visitors interconnected. When Search Engines bots visits your forum, they may also crawl URLs which have session id parameter in them and later drops them from Search Results.

However, this costs unnecessary processing power and bandwidth to you as well as search engines. The best way to avoid this is to tell bots, that they should only crawl those URLs which doesn’t have session id parameter in them.

This can be done by using rel=”canonical” and Anti-SID canonical tag mod is capable of inserting and locking canonical URL in SMF. For example, a typical board can be accessed by using following 2 URLs:

1. Default URL: http://yourdomain.com/index.php?board=4.0

2. URL with PHP Session ID: http://yourdomain.com/index.php?PHPSESSID=b4759b0e921b397bc007df701bc3d24e&board=4.0

OR

http://yourdomain.com/index.php?P=b4759b0e921b397bc007df701bc3d24e&board=4.0

But, when you visit the Source Page (CTRL + U) of any of the above mentioned URLs, the rel=”canonical” tag remains same for both i.e.

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://yourdomain.com/index.php?board=4.0″/>

This also tell search engines bots to always crawl the default URL, instead of URLs having session id parameter. You can read more about this mod here

3. SEO Sitemap and XML sitemap

If you want to create a HTML as well as an XML Sitemap for your forum, then this mod is best for you. The XML sitemap generated by this mod can be submitted to Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster etc.

The mod efficiently uses SMF 2.0 hook system, so there’s no file modification necessary before and after the installation. You can read more about this mod here