Preparing a DotNetNuke Active Forums site for SEO push

[KeriMorgret]

I'm in the process of buying and running an existing forum that is running on DotNetNuke 5.2.0 and Active Fours 4.1. As part of the transfer, I'm asking that the site be upgraded to the latest version of DNN and AF 4.3. AF 4.3 has SEO-friendly URLs instead of the current long, ugly default URLs, and I'm looking forward to implementing that feature.

My specific question is:

What would you do to prepare for this upgrade in terms of the content, especially related to the URL changes?

I've gone into Google Analytics and downloaded content by page title, exported the first 1000 results, and put those titles into Word and corrected spelling errors in the title so URLs will be based on correct spellings.

General background:

• The site is not currently monetized, and there will not be an initial focus on monetization and likely only smaller efforts (affiliate Amazon links in a resource section) in the future.
• The site is free for users.
• I'm fine with taking a hit in organic traffic in the short term. About 1/3 of the traffic is from search engines right now, and less than 30% of the visitors are new visits.
• The site is going to continue much the same as it has until now. Same moderators, same purpose, same skin, etc.
• I have access to GA, site is verified in GWT, need to verify in Bing, and I do have root access to the server.
• I've already started working on image file sizes, both of user-submitted images and site-related images like the header.
• Until now, I have no experience with DNN or AF or any of the extensions (and am appalled at the price and lack of features of some of those extensions, compared to what I'm used to for WordPress).

More general questions:

In terms of SEO, I'm intending to treat the upgrade of the forum with the friendly URLs as a re-launch. I'm wanting good URLs, put in a site map, fix non-www to www, etc. When I start making the changes and submitting the site map and generally drawing Google's attention, I want Google to like what it sees, and have as much optimized as possible when googlebot comes around. My goal is to draw more targeted visitors from search that are interested in the content in the site.

What other suggestions do you have for the site prep, both from being a forum in general and specifically on DNN/AF?

I'm not putting the URL out just yet, as we haven't announced to the users the change of ownership is taking place.

Thanks everyone!

[KJ-Rodgers]

I run our sites on DNN and am going through this same transition. I have decided that based on the conversion Rand had with the head Binger and the Mozinar about Sitemaps, I am going to create a few of them, each based around a specific category, i.e. Services.xml.

This, from my understanding, will allow me to monitor which pages of each sitemap has been indexed and try to help out those that haven't yet been crawled. Then I will keep a sitemap of the sitemaps. With all that being said make sure the sitemap is free from errors, DNN default tabid urls and contains your best of pages.

I think as a forum, this can be great for you if your primary topics contain several ongoing subtopic that gain a lot of attention. Your first steps of capturing what you have already seem to be spot on. Let us know how this works out.

[KeriMorgret]

I've used that sitemap strategy before (a separate sitemap for the different major areas of the site) and had good success with that. I'm going through GA and taking a look at the pages with the most visits and making sure those pages don't have glaring errors for a human or bot visitor, such as missing/mis-sized images, horrid misspellings, etc.

Do you have any advice regarding modules to use or avoid?

More of a general forum question than a DNN question, I'm wondering what the schools of thought regarding changing or cleaning up thread titles are. Do you ever go back and make things more clear, such as changing "a noob question" to "a noob question about [subject]", or standardize thread titles (in a product review section for example).

Does anyone have resources or forums where forum managers can go to answer this type of question (about any changes made to UGC)? I'm wondering where other forum mods hang out.

[KJ-Rodgers]

I haven't done so, I have only user end experience with this. However, I think that would be a good idea to do so, especially if the topic is a good one or receives several replies. A small update to the policies should clear the way to allow this.

I cannot recommend many modules, but I can say buyer beware. I would stay with DNN features like http://www.snowcovered.com/snowcovered2/Default.aspx?tabid=242&PackageID=18835\. Using others can crash your system, remove data tables or just plain out not work as described and you may end up spending more money to hire that company to trouble shoot their own product.

[KeriMorgret]

We've announced the transition, so I can post the URL here. It's http://rcnavalcombat.com/.

We're running out of HDD space on the current virtual server, so I'm shopping for a larger package, and will be setting up the new server with the latest in DNN and AF, tweaking things the way I want, and importing the existing site (and rinse and repeat about five times to get bugs worked out I imagine) then going live with the upgrades on the new server.