I’m kicking off our Quick Tip category with a quick Mingle Forum SEO tip.

If you’re using Mingle Forum to power your community discussion, you would like the topics to be indexed like your posts, quickly and correctly. Now the quick part is already handled by the Mingle Forum Sitemap. The “correctly” part can seem a bit harder, because Mingle Forum doesn’t use custom post types, you won’t have separate “posts” for each topic which you can SEO manually via your SEO plugin per post option. What you can do however is actually very simple, and please let me know if you feel there’s a better way.

How?

Mingle Forum runs in one page, which means each “post” is generated dynamically and inherits the options of that page. So if you set the SEO options for that page as Title: “Great Forum” and Description : “This is my really great Forum”, then that will be the SEO settings for all posts.

Now how do you fix this? Simple! Set your SEO plugin to automatically generate post and description meta titles, leave your Forum Page SEO details blank and let the plugin then populate those field automatically on a per post basis.  You can see these settings in action by visiting our forum. (You can also use it).

I’ve had some questions regarding the indexing of Mingle Forum topics  and issues of duplicate content due to canonical URLs. As far as I know submitting the Mingle Forum sitemap will sort out any indexing problems as topics will be listed according to title and their unique URL.  If you know better, please let us know. You can check for duplicate content here.

Do you think there’s a better option?

Update : I’ve switched to the latest version of bbPress as the development of Mingle Forum has stalled. I think Cartpauj is busy working on a completely new forum, but until then I will use the greatly improved bbPress. It also plays very nicely with Genesis, so that’s a plus.