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SEO for SMF Forums, Some simple hacks
July 30th, 2008I have been doing some work over at my Affiliate Marketing Forum, Affearners. Minor tweaks really but I felt that they could be useful to anyone else with an SMF powered forum.
I would really like to spend some time ripping the whole thing to pieces as its all table driven and the code looks like someone threw it up, but instead of that mammoth task I did the lazy thing and tweaked it to get some benefits.
First off Affearners uses the SEO package created by Earl over at Syndk8 and I inherited that when I bought the forum. In my opinion it does a decent job of sorting the URL’s out but has some issues that perhaps newer packages dont (I dont wanna go through a complete URL migration so sod it it will do).
So first thing to sort is that the post pages dont even have a decent H1 title, so that should be easy to sort…
Open up dispaly.template.php (in your current forums theme folder) and change the following line: -
', $txt[118], ': ', $context['subject'], ' (', $txt[641], ' ', $context['num_views'], ' ', $txt[642], ')
And replace it with the following: -
', $context['subject'], '
Thats gotten rid of the crap we didn’t need in there and made the page title a nice H1.
Next the formatting may be a bit crappy for your forum so we may have to alter the CSS to sort that out. Heres what I did, open up style.css (Same folder as display.template above) and add this to the end of the stylesheet: -
/* seo hacks etc */
#top_subject h1 {
font-size: 16px;
line-height: 18px;
color: #ffffff;}
That just makes the title big but still fits in nice even if people do long stupid titles (Like I tend to 
)
Thats it really, simple change really but I feel a lot happier about the what each page is saying about itself.
Related posts:
- Friendly 404 page for SMF Forums
- Solving forum profile spam
- Wordpress hacks and fun fun fun
- How to stop forum link spam on SMF
- I now own Affearners!
4 Responses to “SEO for SMF Forums, Some simple hacks”
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About SEOidiot
Hi my name is Paul Madden and I am a UK SEO based in Lancashire, for years I have been cursed by the nickname SEOidiot which started life as a form of abuse from someone but you need to decide for yourself how accurate the term is.
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I have being wondering how to add H1 tag in my forum.I tried as you adviced but can’t perse the template.post page always show error is this working in the leatest version 1.1.8 please reply,i will visit again.Thanks.
Its in display.template i think – been a while since i looked
Yeah I did it in display.template.php It can’t perse In the post page.Iam using default template.and the leatest version.