In the blog post 8 Tips to Improve Your Community’s SEO, justin explains that SEO is about making your community discoverable through search engines like Google by focusing on relevance, quality, authority, and user experience—not outdated tactics like keyword stuffing. The article outlines eight practical tips, including starting helpful discussions, ensuring mobile and desktop usability, and optimizing topic titles for keywords. IAmGav adds that while SEO helps attract members, the real work lies in building relationships and caring for the community. Pat raises a common question about subdomains vs. subfolders, to which HAWK responds that neither offers SEO advantages—confirmed by Pat after reviewing a follow-up article here. Pat also notes that modern SEO largely revolves around Google’s opaque, ever-evolving algorithm, meaning all advice is necessarily approximate. HAWK agrees, underscoring the need for adaptable, fundamentals-first SEO strategies.
Helping people find your community takes time and patience. It also takes a little knowledge about search engines, how they work, and how people locate your community through them.
People tend to forget this part. 
Thank you very much for the blog 
Very nice post, but you didn’t address a question often asked about forum hosting: How does being a sub-domain affect SEO?
I believe we have a follow up post in the works which will address some of the technicalities, but in short – subfolder installs have no SEO benefit over subdomain installs.
Thanks, @HAWK. My own search also supports the ideas that sub-domain offers no SEO advantage. I look forward to the follow up post by an expert to get more technical insight.
This one? Handling SEO for Discourse Communities
Thanks, @HAWK . this article explains it very well (and I am in agreement).
One thing to add, maybe the blog may want to add too: SEO essentially nowadays means only Google search. Google’s entire edifice of business stands on its search engine. Hence, Google is not going to tell the world exactly how it’s search engine works–that’s it bread and butter. All they will tell is few facts with sufficient generality, more to spur some action from site creators rather than give deep insight. So all SEO advice, though correct, is only an approximation of google search engine. It is–at the end of the day–an approximation high-level view of the search and rank algorithm. This algorithm, it should be added, is ever-evolving–often on a daily basis.
Yup, agreed. Good call.