vbSEO and I

Hi Adam,

While we do love the possibilities vBSEO creates, we do not want to create the false impression that a sky rocket of traffic will happen overnight. You are definitely right that SEO does not time and patience. That sky rocket is not going to happen for everyone immediately.

One other important thing to note is that we never want forum admins to install vBSEO and then forget about their forum. Community building, great content, + link building, etc, is still required for those who want to build the most successful communities. In your case, I know that you have been working hard in many of these areas, and I really expect them to pay off for you.

If you don't see any dramatic spikes in your traffic immediately, don't let that get you down.

You mentioned the "topic of your website". You are absolutely 100% correct about this. Certainly, not all forums are created equal. Those who carefully select a targeted niche, with lower existing competition, and drill down into specific sub-topics rather than general concepts (with their content creation) are going to have a much easier time gaining traffic.

On the other hand, choosing a topic that is more general, in a more saturated area with established leading websites/forums makes it more difficult.

In either case, having vBSEO installed is the ideal situation to get maxed out. If you have a targeted niche, vBSEO will accelerate pulling in the "easy traffic". If you are in a hugely competitive niche, vBSEO may be the only lifeline you have to compete (SEO wise).

When I complete reviews of forums in really competitive, saturated niches, one of the things I immediately pay attention to is the sub-forums (including their titles + descriptions). What I want to know is basically, are they targeting the same general stuff every other forum on the topic is covering, or are they zeroing in a specific sub-topic where there is less competition? Are they making sure to get good startup coverage of keywords with details descriptions, or are they missing out on the opportunity?

You have some great sub-forums, BTW.

The long tail of SEO is going to deliver huge success with thousands of hits for thousands of different pages and keywords. For most forums, the days of trying to rank for 1 particular keyword that will deliver 1,000,000 hits a month are pretty much over. However, the best part is that long tail SEO can absolutely make 1,000,000 hits look like nothing. Imagine having 1,000,000 *pages* that each get about 3 hits per month!

Here are some additional tweaks that might help you:

• How many of the links in your "Site Navigation" can you get rid of for guests?
• Can you link of some of the keywords in your welcome message to specific sub-forums or threads (even better) that contain specific information?
• Let's get rid of the format "Welcome to ... " for good. Let's switch to the format " ... - more info ...".
• Get rid of the text "Hi Guest !"
• Instead of "Today's Discussions", why not the most visited/replied to threads ever? These ones have already *proven* themselves to be of interest to more users. On top of that, they'll keep lower value content that trickles in during the day off of your homepage where it does not deserve the link/exposure.
• Are you getting traffic for any of the terms in your tag cloud? If not remove them. If they don't deliver traffic, they don't deserve to occupy space/links on the homepage.
• Maybe you can wrap up your "What's Going On?" section in our HTML Virtual Display, to prevent that noise content from disrupting the search engine view of your forum's pages.
• Have you ever tried our Relevant Replacements?

Yes Also Use vBSEO Virtual HTML With "Users active" and "Total members that have visited the forum "
and Also use it if you will install Cyb Forum Statics

Another way to think of this also is the KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index):

The very best keywords have high popularity (as in a large number of searches), but are not very competitive, that is they do not appear on a large number of pages. This relationship is represented by the Keyword Effectiveness Indicator, or KEI.

More complete explanation here:
KEI - Keyword Effectiveness Index - Identify keyword that are easier to achieve top 10 rankings

As Juan is indicating, the higher the search volume, the more traffic you can expect. That is dampened (or reduced) when it's hard to compete (too much competition).

The KEI is a way of balancing terms (representing keywords from a particular niche topic) between popularity & competition.

More popularity good. Less competition good. Both = better.

So the challenge becomes, can you identify sub-forum topics that are going to be popular, but have a lower level of competition?

If you start with a solid framework like that, you can expect your long tail to absolutely explode!

Hi Adam,

Please open a support ticket if the HTML Virtual Display is not working for you:
vBSEO.com Helpdesk

Great job. The tweaks you have done should be an improvement. Please monitor your long tail stats and see if there is improvement in 30/60/90. Of course, you can also try to find other things to improve as well.
What is the Search Long Tail? - vBulletin SEO Forums

Some follow-up comments:

I might even change the welcome message title to: "Morocco, the destination that inspires" instead of just "welcome". I prefer to try to get rid of as many generic phrases as possible in key positions.

If you can figure out how to do it, I would like to see you remove the sub-forum links (on the right) in your most visited/replied to threads list. I think you could also do better by remove the info about who/when it was posted, to reduce the low value links from your homepage, as pass through more link value to the actual content.

Definitely, absolutely always room for improvement. Hoping that your 30 day update will show a some positive impact.

hey joe hows your forums going?

I'm very surprised to hear that you are not experiencing faster growth. How did your long tail change over the 8 months?

I Agree with you Joe
But let me explain the reason :
I checked your site and i found you have only 1000 thread
so i sure the search engines can't give you visitors with only 1000 thread
you should post some new threads or hire some posters to active your forum with members and search engines

Your forum is 90% SEO and Now it is your turn in your site content

A thousand threads should still produce traffic.

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

A thousand threads should still produce traffic.

Ok But the threads content make it didn't send any visitor
low number of people who search for travel
you can say that if the site content is programs,games,movies ....etc in this forum 500 thread will make traffic