Originally published by UUKI Blogs
Hey there, if you are reading this then there is a high chance that you are struggling with driving traffic to your community. Finding the right SEO tips from reliable sources is the key to moving forward. Luckily, you are at the right place. As always, we are holding your hands tight. In this article, we will acquaint you with a few effective tips which will help you to increase traffic to your community and forum.
But before we dive into it, let’s discuss a bit about SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
What is SEO and how does it work?
If we ask how often you visit the second and third page of Google when you need to search for something? Most likely, your answer would be “once in a blue moon”. That's the main reason why SEO is crucial. In short, Search Engine Optimization is the process that helps your website or webpage rank better on the search engine result pages (SERPs) in order to gain organic traffic. The better visibility your community and forum have in search results, the more are the chances you garner the attention.
Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing use crawlers, (also called bots/spiders) to crawl web pages and collect all information they find on the internet related to the searcher’s query. When a person searches for any query, the crawler starts searching from a prominent page and follows internal links to pages within that site as well as external links to pages on other sites. Every time crawlers detect new content and pages; they store the information in an index. The index is nothing but an enormous database containing all information of web pages available on the Internet that a search engine looks through. Search engines look over and fetch content from their index when searchers enter a query, search engines like Google rank web pages based on an algorithm. They assign scores based on various ranking factors like- speed, keyword usage, and backlinks, before ranking the pages.
Here are the factors you should consider for online community SEO
Taking everything into account, the key to generate a high SERP rank for your online community is little tricky. So, here we are going to discuss some tips that can help you increase the traffic to your community and forum.
The sitemap for online community:
Search engines like to view sitemaps. It is basically a detailed blueprint of your community or website. It helps search engine bots to easily crawl different pages of your community, read content and contribute in evaluating the page ranking. It also includes information like when the page was last updated and the priority of the page. The pages within the directory are listed in a logical hierarchical order, where the most relevant pages will be placed at the top of the list, and vice & versa. If the bots are not able to crawl the site, it will not get indexed, and the community will not be ranked on search engine result pages. As a result of this, the community will not get search visibility and expected traffic as well. Certainly, it’s easier to increase traffic to the community if people can find it quickly.
Mobile-friendly online communities:
These days, the first and foremost way people access the web is via mobile. Search engines like Google are observing the user experience of a site on smartphones as one of the major factors in ranking. Google favours pages that are “mobile friendly”, which means, your community should be mobile-responsive and load fast on a mobile browser. If your community and forum are unwieldy, or not so mobile responsive, your search ranking will suffer. To avoid issues like this, make sure that you are using the optimized code. Not all community platforms are created equally! Luckily, if you're with UUKI, you don’t have to worry about this. All the communities built with UUKI are mobile responsive by default. The UUKI has the ability to automatically acknowledge when someone opens the community on mobile and loads the community pages accordingly, to ensure smooth rending and accessibility of complete functionality.
URL Slug:
A URL slug is part of the URL that tells Google what the webpage is all about. Writing a good slug for your page can be impactful for SEO keywords. To create a well-structured URL, you need to keep a few points in your mind, like- it should be short and keyword rich, use subfolders if required, and don't use unnecessary words in it.
Ex- https://www.uuki.live/learn/should-you-use-slack-for-your-community
It also helps the Google crawl bots understand how to reach your page and confirms the content on it. Since the communities and forums are mostly used by different individuals, it is practically impossible to correct all the URLs and make them SEO-friendly. Yet, certain prime threads can surely receive special treatment.
Core Web Vitals:
Core Web Vitals are a set of standardized metrics that Google considers significant in a webpage’s overall user experience. The primary objective of these factors is to make sure websites provide a fair user experience. The metrics measure visual load with Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), visual stability with Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and interactivity with First Input Delay (FID). The easiest way to see the metrics for your site is with the Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console. With the report, you can easily see if your pages are categorized as “poor URLs,” “URLs need improvement,” or “good URLs.” Based on this, you can analyse the areas in which your community site needs improvement. On Google Page speed Insights, always aim for a score of more than 90.
Title and Meta description:
It’s true: title and meta descriptions won’t help in improving your website ranking but they’re quite important for both readers and search engine crawlers.
These two elements provide additional context about the pages and improve click through rates in organic search results.
With UUKI, there is an option to edit community titles and meta descriptions any time, for better visibility of your community and forum in the SERP.
Conclusion:
Indeed, SEO being an imperative section in developing any presence online, you need to get trouble or concern about it. We blanketed a broad range of elements to contemplate for the online community SEO. Recapitulating here that ultimately, the search engines would consider fine, distinctive and latest content for the ranking of the pages. You need to assure that your community eventually conveys pertinent information and enriches your audiences.
Getting this suited and supporting the search engines with the accurate set of evaluations for your pages, your community would unquestionably rank outstanding.
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