SEO

Hi mates,
Greetings from Shadab.

Please critique / review my Forum : Webmaster Forum - GeekPoint
Its a webmaster oriented forum for discussing web development, programming, SEO and online business related topics.

A lot of changes have been made in the forum in the recent past, especially in the forum skin and the SEO aspects.
I heavily modified the skin 'Aria +'. (original : http://www.vbstyles.com/demo/index.php?styleid=12)

The header is now completely table-less, including the Quick-Links drop menu.
And now trying to convert the navbar to pure div+css (table-less) also.

Converted the postbit into the new vB style (userinfo on top), and removed unnecessary images and markup too.
I also utilize H1, H2, H3 & H4 tags on the Forum home for Board Title, category names, forum names & sub-forum names respectively.

Removed the whole "what's going on?" box from the forumhome for guests (bots included ),
as it generated too much hyperlinks/text/code which was completely irrelevant.
(Board stats are still visible in the navbar on Forumhome.)


So, What do you think of all these changes ? And what else do I need to tweak, optimize, change on my Forum ?
Review the adsense ad placement too, please.

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GeekPoint Forum

Love what you've done with the skin.

A few things though:
1. Make the welcome message into an image (check out the tutorial on this site).
2. Improve your RR's.
3. This is personal preference, but to help your C2C, you could/should remove the "last post" column.
4. Your adsense seems to be in a good spot but how does it convert? I've never had a leaderboard ad convert well and like most people say on these forums, you should go with the large rectangle ad as it converts better and makes you more money.

That's about it from what I see, though I just took a quick look.

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1. Okay. I'll convert it into an image. But being a fluid skin, it would be hard. As on high resolutions a lot of whitespace would be left on the left & right side of the image. Any solutions for it ? (Like dynamically choosing the image size according to the monitor resolution?)

2. Earlier too I thought about using RRs. But couldn't find a 'suitable' spot to place it. The only suitable place now would be in the top-right of the header (replacing the 4 links currently in place). I'll test it on my local machine and see if it would suit well...

3. The 'last post' column was hidden in my previous skin. But the users didn't like that change. :(

4. It has a fairly good CTR. Previously I was displaying the adsense ads in the top-right of header. And since moving the ads from the header to the navbar, i have experienced a 2x - 3x increase in CTR. Haven't tested the rectangle ads till now, as i fear that the big ad units would annoy the users.

Thanks Justin for the suggestions.

1. No, I don't think there is a solution for this. You could make it decorative I guess...and have 1-2 repeating images, have the welcome image in the middle and 2 on the left and right side. Other than that, I've always just used the image despite the fluid skin that way you don't have repeating words that you do not need on each page. I'd go with the image to improve my keyword density rather than looks.

3. You can make it so guests can't view the column and your members can. That's what I've always done and I find it to work out best. And if guests want that function, then they can always sign up

1. Welcome header text converted to an image with a matching color artistic / decorative background image.
Take a look and tell how is it?

3. Never thought of that. Great ! I'll try to implement it by tomorrow evening.

I love it man! Good work!

And I believe there is a feature in vbseo 3.1 that will remove the last post column for the guests automatically. So you dont have to worry about doing it manually :P But be sure to view your board as a guest in IE and FF (and if you have safari :P ) to make sure it shows correctly.

Enabled that feature now.

At first it broke the forumhome layout completely.
Then after a minor markup fix, it works fine. (tested on IE7, Fx2 & Opera9)

even validates successfully for xHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS 2.1/3

Updated the Forum logo.
Tell me how is it now ?

Btw, I'm thinking of getting rid of the 4 category links in the Top-Right of Header.
Instead I'll place rotating 468 x 60 banners there.

What do you think ? Is it a good strategy ?

Nice work. Looks great!

Is there a benefit of this ? making the welcome message into an image?

Quoted from this topic : [HOW-TO] Make your Welcome Headers an image!