Just a few questions.

Hi guys .

I have started up a new website for a gaming community/ clan type thing (THIS IS MY FIRST EVER SITE BY THE WAY) ,but I allso want to make it as popular as I possibly can by having reglular content , a downloads area and many things users can do in our forums, and one of the ways to help me achieve this is running VBSEO.

Now the quastions I have are this, I have a homepage template Task Force Alliance , with admin cp were I can add news ect members pics, and links to latest threads. and Buttons to the forums blah blah blah. Then we have the main are the forums Forums , this is obviously were all the action will take place.

The questions I have are wouldnt making the /forums url ranking we eventyually get worthless, who will be searching for that?, I can understand most of you run your forums as the homepage I never understood this untill now.

So really in my postion it doesnt really sound like an optomistic one?, I have really only picked up on this stuff since I purchased vbseo the other day and had a browse though the forums and I am just picking uup on bits and pieces.

So far I have entered my url with google as Forums and made a .htaccess file for the root folder and submitted the sitemap to google undder the forum url ,it appears that the Control Panel Sitemap is still telling me its in the forums and not in the root? this has me confused as I made the htaccess file for this not to happen.

Am I doing things the correct way? and in my position what would be the best way to go about things to get my domain ranking high, and members and visitors hitting my forums.

Please keep in mind my site is only a few weeks old and is a work in progress.

Any advice would be appreciated ,oh and I forgot to mention a lot of this tuff is dutch to me untill I pick it up, but I am a allways willing to learn.

I am not sure I understand all of your questions precisely. However, here is some feedback.

Re: /forum/ vs "root" location of your forum

Either is fine. However, when the choice is available many will choose root. One reason is to shorten the URL length since there will be keywords added to it.

The second reason is for more direct SEO purposes. The theory is that pages listed closed to the root (that is, contained in less sub-folders) on the site, may get a higher valuation by the search engines when ranking them.

I don't have any specific feedback from customers who switched from one version to the other at this time, but this is something I would like to find. Note: To anyone who reads this post, if you are a customer who has done this, please post your feedback.

I know that moving files to the root has worked very well for me in the past. I was running as many as 15 mass generated affiliate sites, all with tens of thousands of pages, optimized based on product names, and using keyword rich URLs with various other SEO strategies.

I did find that sites with the product pages sitting at the root level did tend to get more traffic. In one particular instance, I made almost $2,000 of affiliate income in the first month of launch for a single site! Keep in mind, this was about 5 years ago and search algorithms have changed since then. Many of the things I employed at that time would have certainly been considered blackhat then, and certainly nowadays.

So the final comment is that, this choice is completely open to you to try. Myself, I prefer root. However, I do not advocate customers to change this after they have been running their forum for a long time, *unless* they do it precisely at the same time they install vBSEO.

Re: Sitemap

What issue are you having with your sitemap?

Re: Tips

I'm not really crazy about the logo you're using on your forum pages. Perhaps you could make one that better matches your homepage.

Search our forum for AdSense tips. There has been a lot of discussion lately about a particular AdSense ad size and placement that may increase clickthroughs substantially (3-4X for one customer).

Try doing some keyword research. Perhaps you can rewrite some of your forum names or descriptions to include keywords that might help you rank better. At the moment some of your forums are a bit generic. We have hundreds of customers running gaming forums. Search the web and you may find good examples of sites that rank well, and try to emulate some of the stuff that they are doing.

Remember to keep creating interesting content, and trying to establish links to your site where possible.

You might want to re-order some of your forums. The admin related stuff like donations is not going to be very compelling to newly visiting users. You need stuff to capture their interest, and get them converted to members and participating. To do this, develop something with impact on your site. Get a hook that will capture and draw them in. Your homepage, so far, has greater potential to do this.

You can use your homepage to focus attention onto a particular thread on your forum that you think will get them talking. Remember though, that with vBSEO, we optimize on a thread by thread basis. This means new visitors will be landing directly on your thread pages. For this reason, you should build your *hook* right into the template, so that they always get exposed to it. The easiest way to do this is with a logo/heading that has a powerful (and linked) call to action.

Very valuable advice thanks.

You are very welcome.