This site in Google Search Results

[Dolan]

One method of improving your page rank is to use semantic HTML on the entire site. So all the classes and tags used on the site should reflect which content should be indexed. But, of course, this is harder with a forum, because the markup structure is basically made from PHP templates. So, these PHP-based forums usually don't have a proper semantic HTML structure.

As far as I know, the meta tags are no longer so relevant for search engines as they were in the past. That doesn't mean they're useless, just that they're not the be-all and end-all of page ranking. Search engines have refined the way they evaluate a page and now they analyse more than just a specific tag.

I see that this version of phpBB3 has some semantic markup to some extent: the navbar is marked by nav, emphasised text (bold) by strong, but the rest is just a div soup. No footer tag, the footer is marked by a class, sections are also divs marked by class Section etc. Maybe something could be improved in the PHP templates, by adjusting both tags and classes to reflect the kind of content each tag is supposed to present.

But other than that.. you can increase your page rank by having popular content that is accessed a lot. (Or paying for advertising on other sites, which is probably not feasible if you have no budget.) Having other sites post links to this site can also increase the ranking of your forum pages. The more quoted this forum is, the higher the page ranking search engines return.

[XeeleeFlower]

All these are excellent ideas! Another thing to look into is AMP. Google loves sites that also have an AMP version. Personally, I am not sure of the necessity of its use for our forum since the niche is so small. If we were able to get some sort of news article in Kotaku, Polygon, and/or other similar sites, that would hold a lot of weight. Google likes links that come from reputable sites.

[lejend]

I think we need to stop and think a little here. Do we really want more members? This is a cozy little community. Let's keep it that way.

[mishka]

Really great information its really help

[deleted_user]

I think we need to stop and think a little here. Do we really want more members? This is a cozy little community. Let's keep it that way.

Open the fucking borders, Beto.