Critique Request: SinoDefenceForum.com

Hello,

I would like to request some ideas and critique for one of my forums:

http://www.sinodefenceforum.com

When you type "sino defence forum" in google, its no where to be seen. I need to figure out why? Also, out of about 2k uniques daily, about 9% of that are from search engines!!! That needs to be more than 50%!

thank you

Without looking any further, I would say your major issue is in your footer:

Cheap Car Insurance | Home Insurance

Thanks, that is an issue and those links will be taken down by this Friday. How can one avoid being punished for such advertisement?

• I would recommend getting rid of the FAQ link, Member list link, and Calendar links in your navigation (using conditions) for guests.
• I'm not a fan of the footer archive links, although yours are in a more reasonable range, since there are only 24.
• Please rewrite your welcome message with niche specific links and consider getting rid of the FAQ link.
• I would also get rid of the "Mesothelioma" link on the left. Paid links may give you short term revenue, but will result in long term failure to grow. You need to make sure the links on your site are on target with your theme.
• As I suggest to all, you can possibly improve your sub-forum descriptions to get better keyword coverage into them.
• You have a lot of outbound links to the other defence forum on every page. I think these are leeching from you a bit.
• I would urge you to upgrade to vBSEO 3.3.0 so that you can take advantage of the Virtual HTML Display feature. I would like to see you apply this to the display options and moderators list on your sub-forum pages.
• It seems like you are copying/quoting many news articles, and then adding comments. I think I would prefer seeing you comment on the topic of the news article without pasting in the whole article. Perhaps a quote would be better. If it's a news related item you can talk about it in your own words without pasting in the original duplicate content, and without a link back to the original source. Example of one I viewed was here, but there are many others:
• http://www.sinodefenceforum.com/worl...cean-1052.html
• I would definitely replace your showpost links on your thread pages with Permalinks.
• I think I would completely get rid of the "New to Site?" and "Need Help?" boxes at the bottom of the site. Except for the password forget and the contact links, they are not really needed for guests. Place the other 2 links somewhere else.
• You should not be applying your sub-forum description at the top of your thread pages. Use our Relevant Replacements instead. These will also get you H1 tags onto the page. FYI - This is not going to work as good as long as you have copied news content as the first part of your thread pages.
• One good thing you do when you copy the news stories is to make sure you make a new title. Try to make them even more unique so they don't blend into the hundreds/thousands of other pages Google with find with almost identical keywords in the title to describe the story. Find something in the article that would not be generally used for the title and include that instead.
• I just realized that that the photos on your main page are from defencetalk.com as well. I would move them to the bottom. Better yet, I might even get rid of them for guests since it's promoting traffic to the other site, not to the current one you're trying to optimize.
• Your forum is accessible from both www and non www versions of your domain. You should choose one, then setup a htaccess directive to prevent them from getting to other (301 to force to the other) and also choose the version in your Google Webmaster Tools.
• You should remove your forum title from the TITLE part of all of your thread pages, so that you can have better long tail optimization.
• You should configure your forum to place the CSS code in an external file instead of embedded in the page.