I have noticed a yahoo! and googlebot as members on my forum.  Is this something that E-Blah has built into their application?

What are the bots looking for?

How can I add tags to get more hits on my forum?

(remember I have only my url point to the Pl? forum.)

Quoted from threewishes

I have noticed a yahoo! and googlebot as members on my forum.  Is this something that E-Blah has built into their application?

What are the bots looking for?

It is how search engines know what to deliver up when someone comes looking for your fascinating content.

Quoted from threewishes

How can I add tags to get more hits on my forum?

(remember I have only my url point to the Pl? forum.)

Oh yes. You can put a "robots.txt" in your document root which tells the well-behaved bots which parts of your web-site to visit.
You can put the relevant meta tags in your web page headers to tell the searh engines what your web page is about.
You can tell some of the search engines directly about your web-site.
You can also make sure that other sites link to yours (though there are ethics and ettiquette to this of course).
There is a section on this site for showcasing E-Blah sites - that would be a legitimate start.

This should help quite a bit.
http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/webmasters/

If you are really desparate you can even pay Google!

So let me understand this. those bots are coming automatically already even though I havent 'advertised' yet?

what should I put in robot.txt?

How can I attach meta tags to my forums homepage?

Bots trawl the web, it's their purpose  

meta tags example

<meta name="Robots" content="index,follow">
<meta name="revisit-after" content="3 days">

no need for robots.txt unless you want to specify folders to disallow.

Quoted Text

Oh yes. You can put a "robots.txt" in your document root which tells the well-behaved bots which parts of your web-site to visit.
You can put the relevant meta tags in your web page headers to tell the searh engines what your web page is about.
You can tell some of the search engines directly about your web-site.
You can also make sure that other sites link to yours (though there are ethics and ettiquette to this of course).
There is a section on this site for showcasing E-Blah sites - that would be a legitimate start.Oh yes. You can put a "robots.txt" in your document root which tells the well-behaved bots which parts of your web-site to visit.
You can put the relevant meta tags in your web page headers to tell the searh engines what your web page is about.
You can tell some of the search engines directly about your web-site.
You can also make sure that other sites link to yours (though there are ethics and ettiquette to this of course).
There is a section on this site for showcasing E-Blah sites - that would be a legitimate start.

Don't use robots.txt unless you want to disallow certain directories.
Don't use meta tags, E-Blah adds meta keywords automatically if your settings permit.
Submitting to search engines is pointless, they'll find you and crawl you before long anyway. There's little if any evidence to suggest that submissions speed up finding your site.
Getting sites to link to you is very good, providing they're valuable sites, You don't want zero authority sites linking to you. 1 link from about.com is worth much more than 1000 links from worthless sites.
The E-Blah showcase is a good place to start. Eblah.com is a relatively high authority domain and your allowed to link in there and it's not a no-follow link either.



The <meta name="Robots" content="index,follow"> is harmless, little if any benefit but not detrimental.
The revisit-after meta tag tells the bots not to return until the period has elapsed, it doesn't tell them to return when that period has elapsed, a common mis-understanding. Leave it out.

You might want to create a xml sitemap.xml file of your forum periodically, it'll help bots find your threads and content if they have trouble finding it via links in your pages. xml-sitemaps.com does upto 500 pages free.

Posted on E-Blah showcase thanks!

How do I make sure the E-Blah is setup correctly? (E-Blah adds meta keywords automatically if your settings permit.
)

Go to your settings panel, the "view all settings", press CTRL + F to search for text and search threshold or auto-tagging. When you find that setting, set it to around 1,2 or 3. Then upload a stopwords.txt to your prefs directory.
Google stopwords for a list.

Is it good to have an Alexa bot visiting my site? It has been spending time in my member list.

ThreeWishes. All bots that are named visiting are good. Bots that collect email addresses and attempt spam etc.. Justin, didn't program their names into the software obviously.

Alexa bot gives you a ranking among other similar websites. GeekIMO currently has an Alexa rank of about 700,000 and eblah.com has 289,000 lower is better.

Okie thanks!

am I right in believing that bots only see the content of a guest so if you have boards only accessable by certain member levels the bots can't access them ?

All bots, Uncle Jack, only view the forum as a guest. So things that aren't available to guests, aren't available to bots. They may appear to be accessing the admin Center when you look at the where-is but they're simply seeing the admin page with an error saying they don't have permissions to view that area. E-Blah is safe in that respect.

So you need to make guest able to see posts then?

If you want your site to be indexed by search engine crawlers, then yes. You'd need to make your site's threads accessible to guests.

Many people make the mistake of locking out their sites, in hope more people will register. But then it won't be indexed and you won't be found from search engine queries.  

Thanks I allow guest to view posts now.