Critique my gaming forum!

[HypedGaming]

What's up guys

I'm slowly trying optimize my forums to be both user and search engine friendly. I might be missing some stuff that would make it more friendly so please critique my site! (critique on any subject helps!)

Call of Duty 4 Forums

[Joe Ward]

Your forum looks good. I think you should probably convert your welcome message (for guests) to an image.

Also do a detailed analysis on your forum names, descriptions to ensure that you have covered a variety of terms in your niche that you can compete for.

Some related tips:
http://www.vbseo.com/f84/mabiguru-co...37/#post128737
Please Let me know

Here is my recommended strategy on optimizing forum title and descriptions:
http://www.vbseo.com/f84/im-finally-...98/#post131091

[HypedGaming]

Is there an advantage to converting it to an image?

[Joe Ward]

Absolutely, otherwise we would have no reason to suggest it.

What happens is the following:

Your welcome message appears for guest visitors (and also search engines), and usually is displayed on all pages at the top.

This means that the first text the search engines are going to find on all of your pages is the welcome message.

You want the first text to be something relevant to the page, not a generic welcome message.

With vBSEO (as with any good content site), we optimized on a page by page basis. You want each page to rank for the keywords it contains.

In order to do this, you need to get rid of text that could *confuse* the search engines as to the meaning of the page.

This is why we convert to an image. It makes the text continue to be available to guest visitors, but it is invisible to the search engines and cannot impact the SEO negatively.

[HypedGaming]

Thanks for the advice, but I'm using the limited guest viewing mod (or whatever it's called) I'm pretty sure it automatically removes it for all the major search engines. I used the Welcome Header's mod for a while and I did see what you are saying.. fortunately this mod fixes that

[FightRice]

Nope, the lmited guest viewing mod won't hide the Welcome headers text from search engines.

It will make sure it doesn't appear, when the "Remember to register..." page is called from vewing to many threads/posts. But it doesnt effect the welcome headers other then that

[HypedGaming]

I'm pretty sure it removes it all together for search engines.

Google Cache: New Maps - Call of Duty 4 Forums

Doesn't show up in the Google Cache of the threads