Progress Report - www.mygermanshepherd.co.uk

I set a forum up for my wife ages ago, as her traffic has started to rise, organically and she has plenty of good content built up, I decided to treat her to vBSEO. From past experience this has proven on our other sites, to bring us plenty of visitors.

Her forum is My German Shepherd

Although her site is not the busiest on the internet, this should now help her grow it quicker.

Installed date: 7th April 2008
Members: 205
Posts: 7820
Google Listings: 1320
Yahoo Listings: 1528
MSN Listings: 2

I will try and update this thread once a month.

How many different keywords does she get traffic for now?

Re: What is the Search Long Tail? - vBulletin SEO Forums

Hi Joe

In all honesty we have not even tried to SEO it until the last week or so.

We use a website:

Meta Tag Analyzer

And have managed to get nearly 100% on all Title, Description and Keywords within the last week or so. Although this site is a hobby for her, I think its about time she took it to the next level.

Therefore vBSEO will help with this as well as Sitemap (installed today) and also Google Analytics (Also setup today)

It will be interesting to see the progress made with this and I will report back.

Thanks for the link.

How many different keywords does she get traffic for now?

With not monitoring any stats since inception, pretty hard to answer I would guess :(

Ok - well now that you will have Analytics setup, you can monitor from month to month.

I had a tough time finding the link to forumhome (maybe because it links with a phrase as opposed to 'forum', 'forums' or 'forum home',etc.). She might want to consider adding a larger, more visible link to forumhome in the header or even an image.

Keep us updated on your progress!

Good point. I created a blog post awhile back about that. Many forums actually made it difficult to find the forum home link:
In an *Ocean of Links" - Make Sure Visitors Can *Find* Your Forum - vBulletin SEO Forums

Originally Posted by Juan Muriente

I had a tough time finding the link to forumhome (maybe because it links with a phrase as opposed to 'forum', 'forums' or 'forum home',etc.). She might want to consider adding a larger, more visible link to forumhome in the header or even an image.

Keep us updated on your progress!

Forum home as in forums/index.php

or

as in root ie domain/index.php

If you mean forums/index.php Clicking on the logo takes you home. If you are on about the root, I am going to add the edit to the Navbar for vBA

I have a spare licence for Vivvo so am going to get a CMS made for her as well.

I am going to add the edit to the Navbar for vBA

Now done the hack needed.

Installed date: 7th April 2008
Members: 205
Posts: 7820
Google Listings: 1320
Yahoo Listings: 1528
MSN Listings: 2

One Month after

Members: 255
Posts: 9158
Google Listings: 1760
Yahoo Listings: 2541
MSN Listings: 40

Search sent 1,700 total visits via 513 keywords

Installed date: 7th April 2008
Members: 205
Posts: 7820
Google Listings: 1320
Yahoo Listings: 1528
MSN Listings: 2

Two Months after

Members: 289
Posts: 9984
Google Listings: 1,170
Yahoo Listings: 2,002
MSN Listings: 86

Search sent 1,580 total visits via 663 keywords

Your long tail has grown some, but your total traffic is down a bit. Is it search traffic, or direct traffic that is reduced?

Hi Joe

• Search Engines 1,580 (53.02%)
• Direct Traffic 849 (28.49%)
• Referring Sites 551 (18.49%)

Search engines were on about 14% when we started so the SEO side of it is working. I have a feeling that this is the holiday period and so traffic in general has slowed done.

On hindsight, there is nothing I think we could do to enhance it, the fact that the membership and search tail has grown speaks for itself.

Remember this is a hobby and not a financial venture, so for me the stats speak for themselves. It's growing in members and search engine referrals. Traffic will come as and when people are ready.

I'm sorry. I misread your previous post. I did not notice that you said "search" had sent the traffic. I thought you meant total traffic.

You are doing well. But we like to track progress to find ways to help everyone improve.

It's interesting that your long tail has grown, while your search traffic has dropped a bit. This would tend to indicate that you probably lost traffic for a few terms that were doing quite well.