Forum Guidance Required for Wordpress

[JonathanSmith]

Hi,

I have a client with a reasonable size WP site (around 5,000 pages) and we plan to launch a forum to increase user engagement and interaction. My client is in the B2C sector, mainly male and typically high net worth. I have read the Moz article the-huge-untapped-potential-of-qa-content-for-seo with interest and that raises a few questions:

• Does the Q&A model works in the B2C sector?

• What is the best way to mix / run in parallel Q&A and posts/threads?

• Who are the best technology providers within this sector? It doesn't need to be necessarily in WP, but it would help. We would like to incorporate the same reward structure that has been so well impemented with Moz and so it's the usual buy or build discussion...

• Can anybody highlight great examples of best practice?

Thanks in advance ofr your help!

J.

[NerdsOnCall]

All right, I will answer a couple of your questions (i'll just speak from my personal experience)

#1 you can use a Wordpress plugin or theme to get a "jump start" on developing a forum. Here is a premium plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/qa/screenshots/ that allows you to vote on questions (quora/sack over flow style). If you are looking for a good Wordpress theme, I would check out the theme from elegantthemes.com

#2 Q&A definitely works for B2B. The benefit is that people who visit your website will add to your site's SEO!

#3 To run parallel forum/blog posts at the same time, you have to offer an incentive for using the forum. I would suggest you watch this webinar about Gamification.  At seomoz Q&A you get points for answering questions ( as long as you get thumbs up. lol) A lot of forums will give you a link... basically, people need some benefit from participating.

#4 Make sure your Q&A forum is indexable and crawlable... Good luck!

-Bryant.