Just bought VBseo some help for a newbie please

I have just purchased this product and would like some advice from experienced board members and mods here appologies if my questions seem a little simple:

My forum is located here

1. In the source code of my forum pages there seems to be a lot of formating code before the content of the thread is there anything that can be done in VBseo to make the pages less "code heavy"?

2. when a post is made in a forum is each post indexed in google as a different page even if it is part of the same thread? If this is not the case then is each page of the thread indexed? i.e if the thread moves to page 2, 3 and 4...

3. I already have G analytics installed on my forum prior to installation of VBseo is there any benefit of installing it through the VBseo cpanel over what i have now?


4. From looking at my forum could you suggest any obvious improvements or newbie mistakes that I may have made?

Thanks for your responses in advance

1) Two important options are default in vB that can clean you up. in your vb control panel, go to the general options.
a) change your meta tags to what your board is

Code:

<meta name="keywords" content="vbulletin,jelsoft,forum,bbs,discussion,bulletin board" />
<meta name="description" content="This is a discussion forum powered by vBulletin. To find out about vBulletin, go to http://www.vbulletin.com/ ." />

probably won't help you

B) change your styelsheet to use a file. you will need to chmod 777 the directory (it tells you what to do in the cp)
that will remove the stylesheet from being inline to being linked like

Code:

<link rel="stylesheet".... />

instead of all the bloat.

C) change the phrase to remove 'powered by vb' from the title. see: [HOW-TO] Remove "Powered by vBulletin" from Your Page Titles

2) google will index whatever it can when it wants to Each page will be a seperate entity. For this reason, I recommend a higher than default 'default' page cut off. I use 50 for threads per page, and 25 for posts per page. 25 posts is way better than 10, and it keeps probably the greater majority of your content of one topic all on one page. Longer threads will obviously carry over, but i would say that is less often than a single page thread by far.
The key here is to NOT index showpost. Use the permalink option instead so the direct post goes to /thread/#postnum instead of showpost.php?p=123. (of course, this can also be re-written if you like, and some pre-sets DO re-write this... keep that in mind). I suggest NOT rewriting showpost at all, and even adding it to your robots.txt file.

3) if you already have it, you don't need to re-add it. It's simply a nice easy feature that auto-embeds the tracking code in the footer. The main thing here is to not do it twice. if you already have it in the template, DONT add it to vbseo cp, and vice versa.

4) The purple kinda puts me off, being a guy and all It looks more like a 'womans' forum than a dentist forum.



5) See this thread for making a custom 404 page: Create a Custom vBulletin "404 Page Not Found" Page, and direct vBSEO to use it.

6) install the sitemap generator. http://www.vbseo.com/attachments/f24...itemap-2-1.zip

7) disable the archive. With vbseo, it's uselss and counter productive.
Why the vBulletin archive is useless and counterproductive


8) change your 'real name' here to be your name. A) it let's people know who you are, and B) vbseo.com is VERY well indexed, and you might find vbseo outranking your own site for that term, which you probably don't want

Most importantly, browse around here and come back often. There's TONS of great info posted here every day.

hello thanks for your lenthy answer however im a complete novice and a lot of the above is hard for me to digest, i know it may be quite simple for you guys but here goes.

I have done 1A and 1C from abobe but 1B - I do not understand how to do this ? do i need some programing knowledge? or is there a step by step guide?

point 2 second paragraph comfuses me i guess i dont know much about robot.txt files and their importance im guessing that copying yours and uploading it would be a bad idea as it needs to be specific for my site?

4 - the site is being redesigned after which i will need to design a new skin for the forum - but i hate the purple too so you are not alone

6 how do i install teh sitemap generator

7 how do i dissable the archive

I feel i have bought this product and I am well out of my depth, i would have though that in the intsallation that all the above would have been included. Is there anything i can do to resolve this can this be done by vbseo staff for an extra fee?

6) You can download it from here towards the bottom of your download area. Basically, upload the files to your FTP, chmod the data directory inside of the vbseo_sitemap folder to 666. Import the product and you are finished. (No need to edit the .htaccess since you already have vbseo installed )

7) AdminCP->vBulletin Options->Search Engine Friendly Archive. Set first option to no.

how do i do the following:

B) change your styelsheet to use a file. you will need to chmod 777 the directory (it tells you what to do in the cp)
that will remove the stylesheet from being inline to being linked like
Code:
<link rel="stylesheet".... />
instead of all the bloat.

B) AdminCP->vBulletin Options->Style & Language Settings

Put the yes on the option: Store CSS Stylesheets as Files?

That's all you should have to do. If it does not work right away, then go to your FTP->Forum Directory->clientscript. If their is not a folder in their titled: vbulletin_css, then make one. After making it, chmod the folder to: 666.

hello i have doene the style sheet thing but there is still a lot of CSS code on the page can someone look at my forum and let me know if i have done this correctly?

It does not seem that you have done this correctly. Is the folder that I stated above on your server? Also, what are the contents of it?

yes i have the folder saved on my server i did chmod it to make it writable have i missed something crucial - does this only apply to new pages created after making that change or does it apply to all?

the path to the folder is forum/clientscript/vbulletin_css

the folder is Chmod 666

there is a file in the folder called index.html

And your vbulletin setting is saved to yes?

thats correct its saved as yes

try 777. i've never had luck with 666

just tried 777 still no luck! i must be doing something wrong? the instructions seem straight forward? the only file in teh folder is index.html is that correct?

it will WRITE a file to there when it runs correctly, such as

Code:

http://www.vbseo.com/clientscript/vb...5e6e-00052.css

which is why it needs to be writable (666 or 777)