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.

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