vbseo Case Study - Toymods.org.au - new user experience

Hi all,

I wish to place a case study of a user limited in skill and knowledge of both vb and vbseo.

Toymods Car Club


History of the Site:

The Forum is owned by a Car Club and it's members and is a non-for-profit organisation.

The Forum itself started from the old Yahoo style boards around 1999 as a means of contact for the Car Club and went to FUDforums in 2002, vb3.6 in 2005 and it has recently I have been involved in upgraded to vb4 (4.1.2) and I am doing a crash course in learning how to repeatedly break and fix vb.

The forums as a whole started as an extension to the car club in NSW Australia but have broken out to being a national/international registration base. The forum has a reasonably mature user base (with the normal childish users).

Recently the forum has been attracting some decent advertisers and this indicated that with some more traffic the forums could become self sufficient and the advertising income could be poured back into the forums for improving the user experience.

The forum was always developed with the intent of the members best interest so any SEO work was never in the develpment and the stats may reflect this. But since I have been involved and getting an idea of advertising vs traffic. It has become apparent to do some SEO to benefit the advertisers, and hopefully bring new users and thus new content.

Since the beginning of 2011 I have been doing a crash course in vb4 to rebuild the old vb3 templates to something similar to the old forums for the users, and added Google Analytics & adsense recently.

The following stats stand as a benchmark, and it is my intent to update on a monthly basis for the first 3-6 months with regular updates thereafter until the end of my tenour on the commitee.

Web Site History:-
July 2005 - Old FudForums shut down and New Forum Started on vb3.5(ish) Old forums still exist as a link in the new forums.
March 2011 - The vb3 forums were upgraded to vb4, Google Analyitcs were added.
June 2011 - Adsense added (more to see what it was all about and for backup income)
July 2011 - vbseo added ( basically with default settings )


Baseline Stats -
On vb3 - Using Data provided by on of our direct advertisers. Unique Visitors per Day (ave.) - 3500
On vb4 - March to June 2011 ( there was a jump in traffic from vb4's URL naming)

April 2011 - vb4 only
Visits - 113,562
A.Unique Visits - 52,289
Page views - 572,510
Ave Pageviews - 5.04
Time on Site - 0:06:33
Bounce Rate - 47.87%
New Visits - 38.80%

May 2011 - vb4 only
Visits - 125,647 (up 10.64%)
A.Unique Visits - 57,540 (up 10.04%)
Page views - 624,462 (up 9.07%)
Ave Pageviews - 4.97
Time on Site - 0:06:24
Bounce Rate - 48.44%
New Visits - 38.37%

June 2011 - vb4 ( adsense added late June )
Visits - 128,129 (up 1.97%)
A.Unique Visits - 61,718 (up 7.26%
Page views - 588,232 (dn 5.8%)
Ave Pageviews - 4.59
Time on Site - 0:06:04
Bounce Rate - 50.79%
New Visits - 40.10%
Alexia Rank - 415,407 Global - 8487 .au
Most users ever online was 380, 27-06-2011 at 10:18 PM

I'm unsure at this stage what data is important to future people looking into this thread, so feel free to comment.

I freely admit, vb, vbseo is all new to me so suggestions are welcome.

I am going to do some research in to a few common areas for improvement that generally come up in the "Critique" Forum, then I'll ask this forum to be Critiqued.


Cheers
Simon

Look forward to seeing your results.

When did you install vbseo?

Cheek was installed 2nd July. So the results above are my baseline figures. So I'm hoping to see steady increase in the July stats.I have noticed the footprints have been hard at workCheersSimon

Good write up, Simon!. Thanks for sharing

Keep us posted on your progress