Well, it's time. Probably past time. After doing web dev work for several years, I have my own site that I want to promote, so I'm learning about SEO. Not that I was 100% unclued before. But I'd never really gotten into it, because I didn't want to do SEO work. High stress with anxious clients. That's why I quit doing database work, for goodness sakes.

However, it's a different ballgame with my own forum and site to promote. SEO = Cash. Therefore, SEO = Freedom, from having to do projects I don't want to. And that I'm all over!

I actually took over a site with decent content SEO, despite the dynamic URLs and other various SEO no-no's. But the course of the switchover left me totally re-doing the site, without the knowledge or schedule to deal with the SEO consequences. As a result, I got majorly whacked in SEO, and therefore income. Thank goodness it still makes enough to pay for the server.

Got vbSEO installed, including getting the sitemaps up and running and am seeing some short-term results from that. Dropped the archive in favor of vbSEO sitemap-seen comments both ways on this, but one of the google help pages I read used forum archives as an example of dupt. content, and since I'm using a vbseo sitemap, I didn't see the need to have 2.

Next, I'm looking at trying to get Analytics set up in a reasonable way, and consolidate the pages. (It indexes forum root folder, and index.php pages as separate currently.)

New content structure was done with SEO in mind, so I have a headstart in getting that in good SEO shape, but I need to do redirects from the old content that's linked elsewhere to the current, corresponding articles. There are a few in particular that probably have lots of older links. The site has been around for a long time...

I did manage to do .htaccess commands to redirect from the old forum urls. Tried to do one to force the domain without the www. prefix, but members were reporting weird results so I took that out until I understand it better. And since I also have a shared login between vb and drupal (via vbdrupal project), I have a few users with weird cookie issues whenever I mess with that.

Anyway, I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually, but thought I might "think it out" here as I learn my way around.

I like learning new things, I swear, but sometimes, the sheer amount of info I'm trying to process it totally overwhelming. In the last 6 months, I've taken on vb backend, templates, dedicated server management, drupal, and now, SEO.