One of the things that I searched for was an SEO friendly discussion forum. I was not able to find one that had SEO built-in directly.

How can Vanilla could capitalize on this lack in the marketplace?

-- Make Vanilla SEO friendly by default. --

Here are some tips.

**Friendly-urls should be required and make all the URL's friendly. For example, instead of categories/1/ it should be category/category-name/
If anything, you should make it adjustable similar to the way wordpress does it. (there is a reason wordpress is so heavily used and one of the reasons is SEO)

**Sitemaps should be an automatic on feature.

**RSS Feeds should be an automatic feature. Having a feedburner addon would be cool.

**Meta Tags (smart) keywords and discussion should be automatic or at least give the person the option to put the META description and META keywords for each discussion. Example: All-in-one-SEO wordpress plug-in.

I think it would be better for the meta description to be automatic. Keywords could be scanned and generated based upon the initial post with the option to edit . An example might be to make it like a link: advanced options. then put all the SEO options when the user enters the first post.
I guess this could be done as an add-on too, but I think SEO is so important that this should be baked right in to a forum by default.

**Any chance of this happening? Anyone else have any SEO suggestions they'd like built-in to vanilla?

Vanilla does pretty well in search engines, without any optimization except for friendly URLs.

I have a theory for that: it has no garbage in its presentation.

With other forums you have several text fields repeated inumerous times in a page/discussion/topic.
Information such as number of posts, localization and alike for every user represents, to my point of view, some sort of seo pollution, diminishing the ratio between useful information, posts, and repeated and useless information.

One other forum that does this too - displays less information, get better indexation - is PunBB.

For some reason when you search for anything that links to a vB forum you always get the "archive" version in the SERPs.

Yet, there are some drawbacks provoked by Mark's way of doing things, for example by hiding some of those useless fields using CSS, which many times I find in SERPs like "CommentAuthor" or "CommentTime".

If you're looking for a good forum that indexes very well, try Vanilla or PunBB, that's my advice (I have installed both).

Fyorl,

That's exactly my point. Why do we need .htaccess?

Couldn't Vanilla (I have not looked at the source code much as I just downloaded it and played with the past week) have a table index of url to index. This way, when the dynamic query comes in, we search mySQL by title?

This may be more intensive on larger forums though, I guess.

Fmimoso - thanks for the suggestion.

That is true, but make it like codeigniter does or something using index.php/account. I agree having .htaccess mod_rewrite makes it much easier for friendly urls.

Another thing I think I forgot to mention as far as Features is the ability to ping search engines on new discussions. I have not searched add-ons to see if that's already been created, but again that's a feature wordpress has that makes that much more seo friendly. The whole automatic trackback feature too. I think there is an extension for that though.

I'm just saying. Couldn't these be built-in?

Fyorl. I agree. I'm thinking of how I can add that functionality in a cost effective way.