A complete review of VBSEO on my site

Hello all!

I just installed vbseo on my radar detector forum website & very curious to see how it helps my site. My goal is to be on page 1 of google for keyword "radar detector reviews" within 3-5 months from now and the keyword "radar detectors" within a year or less!

Currently keyword: radar detector reviews - im on page 11 now
keyword: radar detectors - no where to even be found past page 35+ :{

Starting off I currently only have 42 indexed pages in google.

My site is brand new, after configuring vbulletin and playing with seo techniques I have had a hard time trying to get even close to getting any traffic to my site and being indexed in google I am on page 20+ for most keywords...so having a hard time....given this is a brand new site I am going to try out vbseo and see what it can do for it. I have tried other mods to do the url rewrites before & man had a hard time with it, especially with vbadvanced the "recent threads" mod they have, impossible to do the rewrites unless you just do a 301 redirect. The install of vbseo I did myself and was straight forward and very easy to install! Plus all the extra features it has in the control panel for SEO that no other mod out there even comes close to it!


here is my url: Radar Detector Reviews Forum & Best Radar Detector Review

also here is the url to my google analytics starting today with day 1 of vbseo, will update this thread as time passes so others can see how well vbseo can do to their site as I am very curious after reading other threads and it seems like it did excellent on their sites as well!

My google analytics can be seen here:

http://www.RadarDetectorReview.net/analytics.pdf


Thanks!

Also if anyone would like to critique my website and let me know anything I should change on it or change for SEO purposes I am all ears. I am not doing any paid advertising just hoping for traffic from search engines & trading links with other sites....so we will see how it does!

a big killer is you "forums" link on the left nav just re-loads the home page, and doesn't take me to the forums as expected. as a user, i would have left your site after that.

Originally Posted by briansol

a big killer is you "forums" link on the left nav just re-loads the home page, and doesn't take me to the forums as expected. as a user, i would have left your site after that.

fixed can't believe I missed that....reason for critique


Anything else someone would improve on this site?

Yes . It will be better if you use Relevant Replacements
You can see this tutorial
[How to] Setup Relevant Replacements with vBSEO

Originally Posted by marco1

Yes . It will be better if you use Relevant Replacements
You can see this tutorial
[How to] Setup Relevant Replacements with vBSEO

great, I just did the edit to my forums, pretty neat mod, thank you!


Anything else you guys see?

Also how about content on my vbadvanced homepage, do you think I should add more news articles to the homepage to give my site more content on the homepage?

Don't use dark colors.
It's harder to read and it looks unprofessional.

Black or dark backgrounds will drive away tons of visitors over time that are looking for serious information

Originally Posted by StarBuG

Don't use dark colors.
It's harder to read and it looks unprofessional.

Black or dark backgrounds will drive away tons of visitors over time that are looking for serious information

This is a very good tip. I went from using a dark skin to a lighter one and my stats improved greatly and still are improving.

Also, look into making your welcome message into an image.

might want to enable the option in vbseo to remove the last post column as well. That will reduce the amount of code that SE's see and it will remove numerous links from your forums page.

Originally Posted by jbartle

This is a very good tip. I went from using a dark skin to a lighter one and my stats improved greatly and still are improving.

Also, look into making your welcome message into an image.

might want to enable the option in vbseo to remove the last post column as well. That will reduce the amount of code that SE's see and it will remove numerous links from your forums page.

I have two "news" threads on the website on front page, you don't think it's any good? I figured it would provide more content for the page...content is king...plus it would keep visitors longer on the website and lower bounce rate

Originally Posted by jbartle

Also, look into making your welcome message into an image.

This workaround will no longer be needed after the next vBSEO, there's a new feature called Virtual HTML Display that wraps non-relevant content in js, therefore making it virtually "unindexable" by spiders, fulfilling the same need.

I am already on page 2 of google now for keyword "Radar Detector Reviews" just about a week ago I was on page 11...so I have moved 9 pages closer to page 1 for that keyword! Also I now have 566 pages indexed from 42! So huge improvement I have seen with vbseo installed so far, will keep you guys updated as more time goes on!

Just having problems with 404 not found...so waiting on google to update with all my new urls with the url-rewrites I had done with vbseo. I have it set to the max crawl rate for my site so it can hurry up and slowly remove the 404 not found from the index and find the new urls with the rewrites in place.

I am also on page 7 now for keyword "Radar Detectors"

Before I installed vbseo I couldnt even find my page on that keyword and looked to page 35+

Nice

Will keep you updated....obviously you can see VBSEO is MORE then worth it and will pay for itself in the long run.

Glad to hear that you are making progress with your top terms. I hope that your long tail has been growing as well.