The Long Tail

[Grampa]

Over on IPB Webmaster, Mike posted this article :

 

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A common step taken by most forum admins is to select a domain name that will contain related keywords. This procedure will get you off on the right foot with the search engines. If you have a tennis forum, then having the word 'tennis' in the domain makes good sense. By the same token, having the word 'tennis' in the domain name of a forum about cooking is not the best selection.

 

When you configure your IPB forum, you specify the name of your forum and by default, IPB will include that name in the title of all forum pages. Although your forum name also has related keywords, displaying it on every page is not always the best option for search engine optimization (SEO).

 

A few years back, a book titled 'The Long Tail - Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More' was authored by Chris Anderson. The book explored how online vendors were generating the majority of their sales by selling more of the less-popular items in their inventories, rather than just selling loads of their more popular items. So the concept of selling less of more was born. Selling three or four copies each from hundreds or thousands of items was generating thousands of dollars of revenue for these companies.

 

If we apply this same theory to a forum, then we need to find ways to get a few visitors on each page, for all of our pages, rather than just trying to funnel all of our visitors to one or two popular pages. This practice is an oft-overlooked method to build up huge traffic numbers.

 

So, how do we increase our long tail?

 

Since forums are all about user-generated content, as a forum grows it will contain hundreds of pages with thousands of keywords. To increase the long tail effect on a forum, it becomes your task to optimize each page for the keywords on that page. If you can drive five visitors to a each of thousand different pages on your site, that is the same as trying to drive one thousand visitors to just five pages.

 

We should all be concentrating on five to ten top keywords on our sites, but if we stop at that, then we are missing out on the traffic that can be driven to hundreds and thousands of other pages by the content they contain.

 

Step one of increasing your long tail search results is to insert keywords in the subject of each post you write. This topic can provide you with some tricks to improve your traffic, so I have titled the thread accordingly. I suppose I could have used 'Hey, look at this' as a subject, but why give up the opportunity to insert keywords into the subject, directly related to the content?

 

Obviously, your members likely aren't interested in search engine optimization, so their topic titles might not be planned quite as well. If I see a well-written topic with an unrelated subject title, I'll tweak the title to get some keywords in there. (With a message to the author, to explain what I've done and why.) If someone misspells a word in a subject title, I'll make the correction for them.

 

Now that you have a keyword-rich subject title, it's time to give that title it's due. Since the topic subject title is going to be inserted in the page title, why not give it all of the spotlight? Why dilute the page title with the name of your forum?

 

On a standard IPB installation, the title of this page would be, 'How To Increase Your Long Tail Search Results - IPB-Webmaster'.

 

I want the search engines to evaluate this page on the basis of the topic title alone, without the forum name being inserted. And it is a simple modification to get that result.

 

Fire up your favorite FTP client and follow along, to increase your own long tail search results!

 

The first change you want to make is an edit to /admin/applications/modules_public/forums/topics.php

 

Find the following -

 

$this->registry->output->setTitle( $this->topic['title'] . ' - ' . $this->settings['board_name']);

 

 

 

Change it to -

 

 

$this->registry->output->setTitle( $this->topic['title'] );

 

 

 

With that simple change, the title of this page is now 'How To Increase Your Long Tail Search Results'.

 

Don't quit now, because we can make the same kind of edit to remove the forum name from your forum pages. On a standard IPB installation, the page title for this particular forum would be, 'IPB-Webmaster -> Search Engine Optimization'. Let's remove that forum name.

This time, you will want to edit /admin/applications/forums/modules_public/forums/forums.php

 

In all versions prior to IPB 3.1.1, find the following -

 

$this->registry->getClass('output')->setTitle( $this->settings['board_name'] . ' -> ' . $this->forum['name'] );

 

 

 

Change it to -

$this->registry->output->setTitle( $this->topic['title'] );

 

 

 

If you are editing IPB 3.1.1 files, you will want to find the following, instead -

 

$this->registry->getClass('output')->setTitle( strip_tags($this->forum['name']) . ' - ' . ipsRegistry::$settings['board_name'] );

 

 

 

Change it to -

 

$this->registry->getClass('output')->setTitle( strip_tags($this->forum['name']));

 

 

Now the title of this forum's page will be 'Search Engine Optimization'.

 

These two simple file edits will increase the focus on your keyword titles, will help you achieve better long tail search results and increase your search engine traffic.

 

SOURCE: http://www.ipb-webmaster.com/topic/5-how-to-increase-your-long-tail-search-results/

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Seems to be no activity going on with that board any longer..

 

Can anyone explain the meaning of this article. Like just what is it suppose to do.

 

It looks real good and if it would work to increase Search Engines to browse your board.

 

I just can't get Traffic to my two boards. I have Google Site Generator installed, I also have Meta Tags mod installed, I've added many Search Engines to the board. But its the same old Serach Engines browsing and yet no traffic, maybe my content is not good, not sure..

 

Anyone have any suggestions or ideas..

[AWS]

What is your bounce rate?

How old are the domains?

What topics do you cover?

 

It sounds like you did everything you could do. It just might be content or it could be the users coming to the site find what they need and never say thanks. Running a site is easy. Getting traffic to it is it easy. Getting people to keep coming back is the hard part.