As anyone with an interest in it will know, search engine optimisation is a difficult and contentious field, not least because of the amount of different opinions and the lack of any definite answers. There are a few things we all know to be good, and a few things that we all know are definitely bad, but the rest is a bit of a gray area. We've done a lot of work to make sure that all of the definite things are covered in IP.Board, and feel we've done a great job at this. Until now however, there's been a selection of features and additions we simply couldn't add to IP.Board core (due to being too resource intensive for many, or too niche), and thus were missing from the product. IP.SEO fills that gap.
IP.SEO is the combination of two applications we've already built: IPS Sitemap Generator and Search Activity - with the addition of some new features. It's designed to be an application we can add all those missing SEO features to, for those that want them, without overloading those users who do not. Here's some of what it does:
Sitemap Generation
Just like in the IPS Sitemap Generator, IP.SEO will build a sitemap for each of your applications that support it, including the forums, IP.Blog, IP.Downloads, IP.Content and more. It will then ping your sitemap to all of the major search engines to let them know what's new.
Search Activity Statistics
This area of IP.SEO is designed for those who love to track what's going on with their forum. It'll tell you just how many times you've had search spiders visit your site, how many users have come to your site from search, their keywords and what pages they landed on.
Meta Tags - Anywhere
This feature is new to IP.SEO - You can now add meta tags (and, as an added bonus, change title tags) on any page of your site. It works as follows:
Once you've configured all of your various meta tags on the above page, you can see them in action straight away:
You can even include the "original" page title (without the board name on the end) in your custom titles by doing entering something like: "My Great Content: {oldTitle}", or simply "{oldTitle}". As you can see above, you can also use * as a wildcard anywhere in your URL to apply meta tags a whole section, or your whole site.
SEO Guidance
Also new in IP.SEO, we've added an "Items Requiring Attention" area that will give you guidance on potential problems with your IP.Board configuration. This serves as our guidance to improving your site for search, you can choose to ignore individual notices. 
We intend to update this application regularly, both to add new features and to update our checks for "items requiring attention", to make sure we're always delivering the best SEO performance we can for you. We've already got some great changes planned, including the much-requested HTML sitemaps functionality. If you've got any questions or requests, please drop them in our IP.SEO forum.
The great news is, this new application is already built! We're just doing our final testing, and will be releasing the application for free in the next day or two, so be sure to keep an eye on the IPS Marketplace for it!
By Guest