Just added VbSEO, Please Critique Please! Thx

My forum has been up roughly 3 weeks. Its an automobile forum specializing in Mazdaspeed. My competitors are killing me in the rankings, so that was was motive to purchasing this plugin. My site can be found below:

http://www.mazdaspeedforums.org

Thanks, i look forward to hearing back any recommendations/suggestions.

Nothing to critique, keep on with the marketing.

I would definitely hide the shoutbox and the donations from guests. Especially since they are at the top of the page. I would also make your welcome headers an image. Look at that huge list of forums is almost discouraging to me to look more. Their are so many, and not a lot of posts yet.

Originally Posted by Michael Biddle

I would definitely hide the shoutbox and the donations from guests. Especially since they are at the top of the page. I would also make your welcome headers an image. Look at that huge list of forums is almost discouraging to me to look more. Their are so many, and not a lot of posts yet.

Well to your trained eye, sure they may appear to be a lot of forums. However, with automotive forums, you need things to be specific. Otherwise, your forum is completely sloppy and topics arent centralized. We have only been up 3 weeks, of course there isnt a lot of posts. 221 members, 5 vendors, i think we are doing damn good.

For someone who is supposed to be staff here, i expected a little bit more professionalism.

Have you thought about getting rid of vBadvanced and redirecting the home page directly to the forums? It took me a while just to find the link to the forums themselves.. and most of your news posts have nothing to do with Mazda cars.. just non-essential website stuff that most people won't care about.

Originally Posted by HypedGaming

and most of your news posts have nothing to do with Mazda cars.. just non-essential website stuff that most people won't care about.

Agreed.

If you want more visitors to your homepage to your homepage to become members, you need to sell them on the benefits of membership.

On one of my sites, I used the vBACMPS usergroup permissions to show a block for guests that explained the features of the site, and hid the non-essential blocks. That both achieves the goal of telling people what the site can offer, as well as increasing the "content-to-useless stuff" ratio.

For new members, I keep the 'About the Site' block, but enable the other blocks (latest posts). For members over 1 month/50 posts, the 'About the Site' block becomes hidden, but they gain access to it through another vBACMPS 'page' that is hidden to Guests and New Members.

• I like the template you used.
• I think you should get rid of the shoutbox and donations for guests as well, as Mike suggested.
• I think you should get rid of the vBA page. I don't think it is adding value in your case.
• I agree with Mike in that you do have a lot of forums. Typically, our recommendation is to keep the # of forums lower especially until you can build up content within each. However, in your case, I like the work you have done to make very specific forums. You could still stand to do a secondary evaluation of you forum titles and descriptions, and also to see if any are redundant or capable of being removed.
  
  • There are definitely other advantages of keeping the link # low, related to SEO. All incoming link value to your homepage has to divided among all of your sub-forums. Since may of those sub-forums are currently empty they are taking some link value perhaps unnecessarily. If anyone does land on those pages, you will probably lose many of them who bounce back to Google, etc.
• Since you have so many specific forums, you definitely should not be repeating your site title within the titles of all of your sub-forum and thread pages.
• I also typically recommend replacing the showpost link with permalink (a vBSEO option), as this is a personal preference I have for forum setup.