Strategy for Optimizing Keywords in Your vBulletin Forum Title and Descriptions

[Joe Ward]

If you selected a very focused and original niche, it may well be that you can get traffic more easily for keywords related to your topic.

For forums competing in more established, highly competitive niches, there will be greater difficulty.

Often a more realistic strategy for generating traffic in a highly competitive niche is by focusing on less competitive multi-keyword search phrases.

You can of course try to optimize for the top terms in your category, but be prepared for a battle as the top SEO experts in the world (including the blackhats) are actively pursuing those same valuable terms. The competition is fierce, and the probability of breaking into the top 10 results is low unless you are a highly advanced SEO expert, and still difficult even then.

However, whether you have an original niche or a highly competitive and established niche, you will still benefit from doing keyword research and optimization.

The following is the outline for one possible strategy to help improve the keywords for your forum titles and descriptions.

Any forum can benefit from keyword differentiation. Here is one strategy on how you might do so:

• Go to the top 2 or 3 forums in your niche. Take down a list of their forum names and descriptions, checking for which terms they are trying to rank for.
• Compare this list against your own. Make sure you have full coverage of all things pertinent to the niche, and (if not) add them.
• Now - take note of their forum titles and descriptions. Your goal here will be to cover the same basic information, but in similar terminology with lower search competition.
• Firstly - you're going to need to evaluate each of the niche keywords that they are competing for, and get a sense of how much competition there is for those terms. One way to find out is simply to check the # of results Google returns when you search for them. Another way is to see what the minimum bids are for those terms in AdSense (the higher the minimum bid, the more competitive, in general).
• Now I would check each term you would like to use through a tool to view related search terms. Your goal now will be to identify similar terms with less search competition, but that cover the same basic ideas. You want to build some unique forum titles and descriptions that can help you to harness traffic that some of your biggest competitors will not be optimized for. For instance, would you really want to try to compete for "search engine optimization"? It's almost certain that you will have no chance of ever ranking in the top 25 pages for this term. Why not try something with a lower search volume like "Organic SEO"? Anything SEO will be hard to rank for. But the idea is to find similar terms, that do get some search traffic (albeit lower volume), with less competition. Do this process on every forum title and description, and even content within your site and you have a much higher likelihood of success in the tough niche you have chosen.

Free SEO Tools & Search Engine Optimization Software

Note: Forum descriptions can be changed more readily than forum titles. Once you have your forum URLs in the search engines, changing the forum titles could have a negative impact on your SERPs in the short-term. Special care must be taken when doing so.

Tip: Use vBSEO Slugs feature to get the rewritten forum URL to include keywords that are different than the actual forum title itself.

Originally posted here:
I'm finally here!

[Martyn]

Problem i face is that there is no other forum like mine, i've searched and searched, and have found nothing, its like im starting from scratch with no help or guidance, why i made the post about the forum description. which im still not 100% on! :(

[Joe Ward]

Originally Posted by Martyn

Problem i face is that there is no other forum like mine, i've searched and searched, and have found nothing, its like im starting from scratch with no help or guidance, why i made the post about the forum description. which im still not 100% on! :(

Well - if there is nothing else like you, you've picked a great niche!

[Martyn]

agreed, but that still puts me in the postition for lack of guidance to look through other websites! :(

[viruslived]

Is there a such thing as "too many" keywords? I understand using relevant words is the key to SEO meta data. I just don't know if Google (or other search engines) limit the amount of keywords.

[Joe Ward]

There is definitely a such thing as too many keywords in your title. The title should be like a normal book or article title. Craft it careful. Do not just add extra keywords to the end. If it does not seem like a reasonable title for you as a human reader, then it fails the simple test of suitability for search engines.

With forums we certainly do not need to overload titles with keywords, since we have plenty of opportunity to get coverage on the other keywords within thousands of pages of content.