I think I could use some advice: www.metal-r.us

As the subject says, I think I could use some advice for my site Metal-R.US - A Worldwide Metal Community. I got vBSEO installed for about a month now and I have noticed increased spider activity from the various engines but besides a small increase at Yahoo and the fact my site got discovered by Ask I hardly get indexed. I know Google has problems but right now I'm down to 11 indexed pages of which 5 show content if I include the omitted results and the rest are useless. I know I'm in a tough area with my site as there are a couple big metal sites which don't even respond to linking proposals so it's hard to get relevant links (most links in Google are from vB related sites). What can I do?

Some suggestions:

Why not put it in root instead of /forums, as you have nothign but a re-direct in root?

» MRU Main Portal
» MRU Forums
both go to the same page... why have 2 menu items for one thing?

meta name="keywords" content="metal-r.us,metal-r-us,dennis,anubis,metal music,heavy metal,death metal,black metal,thrash metal,power metal,speed metal,folk metal,metalnews,news,music,forum,metalforum,metalf orums,cd reviews,album reviews,concert reviews,book reviews,computer helpdesk,interviews,games,arcade,flash games,online radio,radio,webradio,forums,discussion,hosted forum,host forum,worldwide,community,metal,metalheads" />

WAY too many... limit this to 10-15.
get rid of all the crap in there like dennis that has nothing to do with metal music, broad things like "forum" will do you no good... and promoting arcades and computer help desks are not what your site is about.

and WTF is folk metal. lol

I'd change that list to:

meta name="keywords" content="metal, heavy metal,hard rock,death metal,black metal,thrash metal,power metal,speed metal,metal news,cd reviews,album reviews,concert reviews,metal stream" />

pull your css out of inline, and make it linked. This will help with the code to content ratio. you can do this in the vboptions.

validate your code and css
Result for http://www.metal-r.us/forums/index.php - W3C Markup Validator
Result: Failed validation, 17 errors

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/v...ms%2Findex.php
Validator
Error
Target: Metal-R.US - A Worldwide Metal Community
Please, validate your XML document first!


Google hates errors.

Webmaster Help Center
- What are Google's quality guidelines?



Disable styles with the firefox webdeveloper tool bar, and look at your site.

The first thing it sees are links from your menu. you have no h1's, no descrptive text. google can't read images.

display styles here, and you see:

SEO

vBulletin Search Engine Optimization Forums



Which is exactly what google will read.

Code:

<div class="headbg"> <div class="headpic"><a href="index2.php"><img src="/designs/cyborg-dark/sp.gif" alt="Metal-R.US" width="524" height="111" /></a></div> </div>

You will want to use an image replacement technique.
Stopdesign | Using Background-Image to Replace Text

You have a lot of bloated markup. Again, fixing the code to content ratio... you have a LOT more code than content on your index page.

Code:

<span>Register</span>

Span is a meaningless non-semantic inline element.
If your template is using a style to attach to this term, change it so that its on the LI instead.
if that causes problems, give the menu a unique id and associate the li styles with it.

Code:

<script type="text/javascript"> <!--
function log_out()
{
    ht = document.getElementsByTagName("html");
    ht[0].style.filter = "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.BasicImage(grayscale=1)";
    if (confirm('Are you sure you want to log out?'))
    {
        return true;
    }
    else
    {
        ht[0].style.filter = "";
        return false;
    }
}
//--> </script>

I pulled this out of my template (i think it was in the navbar if i remember right) and placed it in the vbulletin_global.js file that's included on every page anyway. Why vB did this is beyond me.
That will again help with C2C.




Or, wait for the vBSEO vB Template that wil address all this, and 2331231 more things Right Juan? :P

Looks like I got work to do...

I put it in /forums as I originally had phpBB running and I wanted to make sure I didn't mix things up when I started building on vB. Something I will change later on as I'm afraid I will break things if I start working on that a couple of hours before I hit the sack.

On the 2 same menu items: probably a legacy thing I overlooked. Quickly fixed.

Meta tags: looks like I've overdone it, tried to cover the many area's while missing the core message. Changed the meta tags to your suggestion. Another quick fix. On folk metal: hell I don't even know what it's supposed to sound like but a mod suggested it.

I will dive into css later on, same reason as above.

Thanks so far, things can only get better...

Yup.

vBSEO can only do so much for you. Having content text as the url is a big part of SEO, and often one of the more difficult to set up.

But in the long run of things, it's maybe 10% of the total SEO package... probably even less.

I decided to remove that site navigation module at all. Only brings duplicate links anyhow. Duplicate = no good.

Now to get my host to work on the load issues of the server my site runs on. It's getting to me again, I think I better go to bed...

you're what, +2? +3?

+2, it's 10:40-ish pm here, woke up at 6 am, so I deserve some sleep by now....

Amateur :P Real Web programmers stay up till 3am every day

hehe

get some rest dude.

Yeah, I'm a wimp...

I finally got around to cleaning up the code with the help of the validator. Only a few errors left, though some might be a result of the content as the number of errors changes as stories are added, not sure. Also changed the css from inline to linked. I'll go on tomorrow...

Finally found time to finish validating the code, both my portal and forum homepage are now Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional. Now I have to make sure that the newsposts don't contain invalid characters so I got to train my mods...

Next step will be h1's and descriptive text and fixing up the c2c ratio.

keep up the good work

Indexed pages at Google suddenly increased from 14 to 690 a couple of days ago and the number has been growing slowly but steadily since. Looks like A) Google is getting their act together and B) cleaning up the code has helped me a lot. I've been working on the C2C ratio for a bit but I still have more work to do in that area. I still have to look into the image replacement techniques too.

Edit: I only just found out the 3.0.0 RC1 version could be downloaded so I installed that. See what I can do with that...