Starting a new forum : Get noticed with vBulletin and vbSEO

**rob** · 12-08-2005 07:24 AM

[this is pretty much a copy of a thread on my forums where someone asked how to get a forum noticed]

This certainly isnt going to be your 'in a nutshell' post and I'll tell this from my own experience from the very beginning of my own site...

The most critical part of launching a new forum is getting the on-page SEO spot on.... I had it hard (running www.webforumz.com) back in our snitz days because it was about as SEO friendly as my left foot.

I worked solidly on snitz making literally hundreds of modifications in the area of SEO. I was lucky as I had a good number of contacts who were into web design / web development and I believe our forum started with around 8-10 members. We never needed to go down the creating ghost accounts and talking to ourselves route.

I and another admin took it upon ourselves to spend time on IRC helping out developers / designers and discreetly saying, 'if you ever need excellent web design / development / seo help, drop by webforumz.com '.... this paid off in small ways, but contributed to the whole.

I went on the mother of all link building campaigns and chat room hopping campaigns and basically did everything possible to get people here.

Over time... I finally decided I'd had enough of what was the spagetti mismatch bodge of code otherwise known as 'snitz' and ditched it for phpBB which is altogether miles better... but not without it's own major downfalls (hey... no offence intended... it's amazing for free and miles better than Snitz)

phpBB was a huge and scary jump because I knew very very little PHP (and still do) and there was so much to organise on the SEO front... phpBB is not SEO friendly either. Luckily one of our admins is very good with PHP so with me guiding the changes we needed.... they all got put in..

About a week after the switch, google had our new site.... and our signups increased double.

We are now proudly running vBulletin, which I consider to be ten times better than phpBB and the best forum software out there. It costs money, but not a lot... and it's very very worth it. Again, it's SEO is not ideal.... but far better than any other forum software... so room to improve? Hell yeah.

I made some SEO changes to vBulletin and also installed a pretty well kept secret (vBSEO) which pretty much eliminates all duplicate content and gives very relevant titles and meta for each page.... plus has static, relevant keyword rich URL's.... an important factor in SEO.... let's just say that my to-do list of SEO changes was almost cut to nothing by installing that product.

vBulletin has been installed quite recently... and vBSEO only a few weeks... has it helped our SEO? Let me just say we've gone from 3-8 new members a day to in excess of 30.... our traffic?? We're serving very often nearly a GIG of data every day and sometimes more.... which is increasing rapidly and no doubt worrying the hell out of our host.
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How to start a new forum:- my advice is simple...

Ditch phpbb... ditch snitz.... ditch everything and go with vBulletin... when you can afford it.

Also, when you can afford to, buy vBseo.

Concentrate on doing everything you can to get members to your website and build up lots and lots of rich content.... even if that does mean using ghost accounts and talking to yourself.

Spend enourmous amounts of time building up quality links....

A very BIG tip: Write some articles, get them published on other websites (easy to do) like http://articles.webforumz.com for instance (for web related stuff).... articles usually always contain links to the authors site.... therefore articles are prolly the best way of obtaining legitimate one way links...... and lots of them.

Once you start picking up pace, you can relax a little and concentrate on adding new features to the forum (useful ones) and improve the place as much as you can to keep people excited and contented to stick around.

What happens next? Well.....
1. keep pulling members in
2. keep getting links
3. keep building great content
4... repeat steps 1-3 ad-infinitum

I guess a big part of our success also comes from the level of expertise present at our forums... I personally have 20+ years experience of IT... with loads of web application building experience plus a good deal of SEO wisdom. Among the rest of the team we have A1 experience in just about every other area of design, development, databases, etc.

I guess you can say that we're all passionate about what we do which has come across to the members here and thus helped us in a very big way.

Your team is just as critical to the success of your site, than you are..... don't take people on who will get in your way and argue the toss over details (Yeah, we've had some of that) and make sure you team is very knowledgable and passionate about the forum subjects and the site itself!!

I hope some people who will no doubt stumble upon this post will benefit from some of the advice and information I give.