Jeep-CJ.com - New Site - Only one week old...

I'd like to ask for a review of Jeep-CJ.com . I have been working on this site for months and it has been open for exactly one week and two days! Woo-Hoo!

I've followed many of the posts and suggestions here @ VBSeo.

Some back ground. As you can tell I love my CJ. I know there are many Jeep sites on the net and I'm a member of quite a few, but I never have seen one that was specifically devoted to Jeep CJ's. So - I created one...

Over many moons I have managed to acquire jeep-cj2, jeep-cj3, jeep-cj5, jeep-cj6, jeep-cj7, jeep-cj10 and finally Jeep-CJ (all .coms). I also own various derivatives of some .nets. They all are pointing to Jeep-CJ.com. Still can't get jeep-cj8 but it does seem abandoned - maybe when it expires...

I have placed google adds, submitted to dmz.org and other various engines. I'm also working on getting link backs via stumble, digg, and other sources, also I'm now going to try and create a news and article every day for the front page.

Since it's only a week old I'm happy with the traffic I am seeing, only time will tell!

Thoughts?

Thank You,

There are a few things in the following resource you should checkout still:
Your Site Review - Stuff to Do First

Some comments:

• I do not like your site notice. It's the first text on every page you have.
• You could replace showpost with permalinks.
• You could replace the forum title and description at the top of thread pages with our Relevant Replacements.
• Change your title on your homepage to "Jeep CJ..." and then add a descriptive phrase describing your focus.
• Change the title on your forum to something such as "Jeep CJ Forum".
• Some modules on your homepage you could get rid of:

Documents, Top Posters, Latest Blogs, Featured Posts

• I would remove the archive completely on your new site.
• I woudl get rid of all of these links in your footer:

FAQ | Member List | Calendar | Today's Posts | Search

• You could purchase the branding removal option for forumskin.com

A recent recommendation I have been making is to get a list of your sub-forums, or preferably just the most important sub-forums and get coverage of them on your homepage (if using vBA or another portal to your forum). You have covered this somewhat in your horizontal nav bar at the top, but it would not hurt to get them listed within the content of the homepage, even if you find words within the blog entries and text you have, and then link it there from the keywords as anchor text.

Thank you very much for looking. I really appreciate the comments and they are exactly what I was asking for.

The 1st guest notice is actually an image if you are first arriving to the forums (not the main page). Then it changes to a small, less intrusive notice. I forgot to change the second one to an image as I did the 1st. That was an oversight on my part. Per what I read here, images are preferred - correct?

I'll look at relevant replacements. I'm having allot of trouble under standing those functions, so inexcusably I neglected them.

I changed 'Forum Permalinks' to the setting of 'Replace post number link with Permalink'.
I changed 'User Profile', 'User Album' and 'Social Group' Permalink settings to 'Link message date as Permalink'.
I changed 'Blog Permalinks' to 'Display Permalink (Anchor Image) at the bottom-right of each Blog Comment'.

I would remove the archive completely on your new site.

Is that as simple as removing the link? I looked in the VB Admin panel and don't see a way to turn it off. I have the VBSeo setting 'Footer Archive Links' set to 'Do not add Links to Archive Pages', what else is needed?

You could purchase the branding removal option for forumskin.com

There is no branding actually, I left that in as a courtesy, I will remove it in a bit.

Some modules on your homepage you could get rid of: Documents, Top Posters, Latest Blogs, Featured Posts

Understand completely - the widgets thing...

• You could replace the forum title and description at the top of thread pages with our Relevant Replacements.
• Change your title on your homepage to "Jeep CJ..." and then add a descriptive phrase describing your focus.
• Change the title on your forum to something such as "Jeep CJ Forum".

• I'll dig into this as well...

Thanks for all the information and help.

Note: The title part is very important.

From Brian's article:

Disable the archive.
Why the vBulletin archive is useless and counterproductive
[How To] Completely Turn Off the vBulletin Archive

See also:
[How To] Determine How Much Traffic is From Your vBulletin Archive Pages with Google Analytics

Thanks again for the help and critique. I have made many changes and have only a few more small ones to do. I's appreciate another cursory glance at the site for anything I missed.

A recent recommendation I have been making is to get a list of your sub-forums, or preferably just the most important sub-forums and get coverage of them on your homepage (if using vBA or another portal to your forum). You have covered this somewhat in your horizontal nav bar at the top, but it would not hurt to get them listed within the content of the homepage, even if you find words within the blog entries and text you have, and then link it there from the keywords as anchor text.

This will be my next major project - I'll construct something just for this purpose.

Thanks again for all the help.

Looking good so far. You should try to get a few posts into every one of your forums to *seed* them, or help encourage users to start posting there. Empty sub-forums are not a good idea and they are also a dead-end for search engines.