another success story

For a long time, my forum was just a hobby - built with phpBB on a site cobbled together with a few other free scripts and not promoted hardly at all. It was just a subject that I had a strong interest in.

I was supremely surpised one day when I was contacted out of the blue by a company that was interested in advertising on my pitiful site. Anyway, I decided to upgrade the site and run with it (advertising revenue) and see where it lead.

So I revamped the site with vBulletin, vBAdvanced, vBSEO, a professionally designed logo and forum template/color scheme. I also started some earnest efforts marketing the site for quality backlinks and relationships with related non-profit groups.

There were a ton of changes made all at once, so it's difficult to discern what portion of the site's current success can be directly attributed to vBSEO, but one thing I find telling is that the site has finally reached #1 on two particular keyphrases where I am competing against a bunch of national non-profit organizations with much more favorable PR/link profiles.

I think you are doing wonderful with your site. While vBSEO is definitely going to contribute to your success in the search engines, all the other proactive stuff you have done is definitely helping in the SEO area as well.

One thing I like about your forum is how clean it is. The whiteness of the template plus the clean logo reminds me of the medical field, so I think your template communicates "professionalism", i.e. "a professional place to get information about epilepsy".

I love that you removed the "last post" links from your forum homepage and from the sub-forum thread lists. I think this is fantastic, getting rid of all of these unnecessary links. I know that it does change the typical forum style used on most vBulletin forums, but it would also be my method of choice.

It reduces links and gets of rid of strange text on those pages that typically accompany the unique usernames of your members.

You should work on converting your welcome message to an image since it is appearing at the top of every page, and thereby skewing the content of each page.

I think you should try using our Relevant Replacements similarly to how we do it here at the vBSEO forums, so that you can get a H1 tag onto the title of all of your threads.

Note: Your forum titles are not optimized for SEO at all. They are very lacking in keywords. However, you were smart in selecting a rewrite option that did not include the forum titles in the URL.

However, the forum titles till appear on all of your forum and thread pages, so they are important. I think you should strongly consider doing a complete review of all of your forum titles and descriptions. Doing so might allow you to start ranking for a lot more terms that you might expect.

Here is one strategy that I devised recently that might be appropriate for you:
Strategy for Optimizing Keywords in Your vBulletin Forum Title and Descriptions

When making any changes, remember to review closely what you already rank for. Most likely you will not want to make any changes that would stop you from getting that current stream of traffic. An example might be changing a forum title that is actually generating you traffic on the sub-forum page, or within a thread listed in that sub-forum, etc.

Are you using the Google Webmaster Tools?
Google Webmaster Tools - Recommended for All vBSEO Customers

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

I think you are doing wonderful with your site.

Thanks Joe!

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

One thing I like about your forum is how clean it is.

I'll tell you a secret... I borrowed the color scheme from John Scott/v7n forums. I asked him for permission first though.

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

You should work on converting your welcome message to an image since it is appearing at the top of every page, and thereby skewing the content of each page.

I've got 2 different links in there which can't be reconciled easily with an image. I'd remove them and use an image if the audience I was trying to draw in wasn't so easily confused.

One thing I did to help mitigate "content dilution" is set the forum default to 20 posts per page so there is more content on each page.

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

I think you should try using our Relevant Replacements similarly to how we do it here at the vBSEO forums, so that you can get a H1 tag onto the title of all of your threads.

I had thought about implementing this, but most of my members use really awful thread titles. I edit them to be more subject oriented when I can (or think the SEO benefits outweigh the potential member confusion), but a large part of my forum's audience struggles with cognitive/memory issues so I have to limit myself more than I would if the forum were addressing a different type of audience.

I'm not sure that H1 tags with bad titles on 80% of the threads would outweigh having the tags on the remaining 20% with good titles. What do you think? If a page is discussing a specific pharmaceutical drug and the H1 tag says "I can't stand it any more!!!!!!" is it going to hurt the page's ability to rank on the drug name (as opposed to the same page without any H1 tag)?

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

Note: Your forum titles are not optimized for SEO at all.

True. It was a conscious decision on my part. I did it this way to give the forum character and make it more inviting and comfortable for my audience (which generally is not very computer savvy in the first place). Sometimes we need to balance SEO with the bigger picture (ie. what good is drawing an audience if they don't like what they see when they get there?). I get a lot of feedback from my forum members commenting on the place's charm. That's something that is hard to develop and goes a long ways to establishing a core community.

Your last link is malformed...

Fixed the link.

Re: Welcome message with links

You can create an image map so that you can keep your links working, even though the text is an image.

Re: RRs with H1s

Editing your titles is a great idea that not many forum admins/mods take advantage of. The truth is that the title is very important.

But to answer your question, I actually do believe that having a good title on 20% of your pages with a H1 will deliver more traffic, even if you feel that you're optimizing for bad titles on the other 80%.

80/20 Rule in this context: 80% of your traffic will come from 20% of your forum pages.

This might seem to contradict the "long tail" theory, but it does not. The "long tail" will be built up within these 20% of the pages.

The others are still not throw away pages. I would still recommend having your mods edit titles whenever possible.

By the way, I think if you have a page with a bad title, even without the H1, you are still going to have a difficult time ranking for most terms found within the page, but not reflected in the title.

You could also just create two images and link each one differently, then put them both in the one notice? I'm not sure if having two images would be less SEO-y, but it ought to make it easier to update in the future, if you ever need to change any words or add a third link, etc.

Good luck!

OK. I've swapped out the Welcome Headers text for guests to an image map.

I also modified the navbar and postbit templates to add H1 and H2 tags. I prefer to maintain the existing look of the forum over adding additional text with the RR as done here at vBSEO.

Thanks Joe for giving me the nudge. We'll see what impact it has on the forum thread pages.

Great. Keep us posted.

Just noticed the other day that Google has graced my site with sitelinks. It's really taking off.

Excellent. For which search phrase does it appear?

coping with epilepsy (the name of the site)

I didn't see the sitelinks when I searched.

see attached

Cool - I'm sure the "Sex" and "Stacy's Story" links will be high click throughs, the later for interest, and the former for the obvious.

I was laughing at the "sex" thread making the list myself. Not complaining - but laughing...