What is the best forum to use?

[realestate]

I am starting a website, tattoos.org. I would like to go after the keyword "tattoos" and them also have a forum on the website to target all the long-tail keywords...

What is the best seo friendly forum to use? Whats the best way to monetize them?

looking for details...
thanks

 

[A D]

You can't go wrong with vbulletin.com

-=DCG=-

 

[Mark Talbot]

I agree with DCG on vB....

A word to the wise,... expect about a hundred Xenforo fans jumping this thread in the near futute to sell you on XF. Yes it is an OK product, no it isnt the answer to sliced bread.

As far as the free ones, phpbb is popular but they are reeeeaaal slow to upgrade the codebase.

 

[tattoos]

I am starting a website, tattoos.org. I would like to go after the keyword "tattoos" and them also have a forum on the website to target all the long-tail keywords...

What is the best seo friendly forum to use? Whats the best way to monetize them?

looking for details...
thanks

Nice domain

I don't know whether VB is or isn't the best for SEO, but it can't be bad otherwise it wouldn't be as popular as it is. It also seems to be well supported.
Because its so popular, most people familiar with forums already know how to use/navigate it, for those that aren't familiar with forums its easy enough for them to work it out. Which is obviously a big plus when starting a new community.

As for monetizing, don't worry about it until your getting enough traffic to warrant it. Once you are getting enough traffic, AdSense is the obvious choice but you can also try and sell your own advertising directly.
Digital point have a nice homegrown system that displays ads that you have directly sold first, and falls back to AdSense if you have no directly sold ads to display. You can read more about that at digitalpointads.com or advertising.digitalpoint.com

Cheers
James

 

[Scott]

Not sure your still looking but Invision Powers latest release is great and offers superior content management and integrated gallery,

 

[VirtualT]

nice enough site, however a shame that that category descriptions have been written by someone who knows little about tattooing

 

[Tia Wood]

Agreed about vBulletin. It costs money but it is one of the most secure, scalable and "complete" forums out there.

 

[rngrdanny22]

If you're looking for free, I would recommend SMF over PHPBB. No real reason, I just like it better since they are finally out of RC on SMF2.

If you're looking for paid, the only two I can recommend are vB and IPB. IPB's latest release looks better IMO than vB4.