Tips for Creating Forums that Rank Well on Search Engines

I found webmasterworld by web related queries. I kept bumping into it. I find many forums this way, including researching products, places to stay, services for my child, etc. That's no surprise because some of the best content is in forums.

How well forum posts rank depends, imo, on several factors:

• Moderation
  Your moderators must pay attention to post titles and edit them for clarity. This not only helps keep forum discussions on topic (thus creating a cluster of posts devoted exclusively to one specific theme), but helps the search engine understand what the thread is about. A post titled, "How do I fix a widget" will rank better than "Help, Newbie here!"
  
  Good moderation will also weed out expletives or undesirable words, which may trigger a safe-search filter.
  
• Forum optimization
  You want search engines to spider and index your content, not thousands of links to user profiles and other useless and superfluous content.
  
  Then there are other issues like making post titles become title tags, stuff like that.
  
• Non-forum content
  For some, it may help to have a section with articles, apart from the forum. The articles are content that can "sell" your site to other sites considering giving you a link. The forum becomes another reason to find your site worthy of a link. This will help boost thread ranking, especially if you ask to have links to your main site AND your forum.
  
  You can then link to specific posts or sections from your link-rich articles. This helps push your posts up in the SERPs, and can initiate a cycle of people linking to specific forum posts from other forums, blogs, news media, and web articles- which then keeps your threads ranking well.
  
• Encourage community and civility
  You want people to visit and contribute often. A hostile environment may keep people away and stunt the growth- and content creation. In my view, if it's about content, then cultivate the content-creators and boot everyone else who can't keep from trolling or spamming your site. It's no big loss as the positives outweigh any negatives.
  
• Listen to your community
  Some of the best changes/additions can come from member suggestions. Do you encourage members to contact you? Not everything works, but some suggestions can help your forum become more popular with users and keep it sticky, which means members are happy and happy members will tend to post, making your forum more useful.
  
• Is your forum useful?
  How useful is a forum about celebrities than a forum that helps people shop, evaluate or create and fix things? Is the net benefit to the user entertainment or personal growth in some way? Maybe this doesn't hold true in all instances, but I believe a good way to measure a site's profitability and ultimate ranking longevity is to measure the forum topic's usefulness versus entertainment value. A useful site is something you recommend to a friend who needs help, and can give the opportunity for a member to help others. That's sticky, builds community, and creates an environment for more content.