New Forum - No Searchable Queries - Please Critique and Help

[viruslived]

WEBSITE: TheFirst2Fight.com

I am running the current version of vBSEO along with the google/sitemaps modification.

The board has been up and running for nearly 2 months now (around a month and a half with vBSEO)

The forum is geared primarily towards the United States Marine Corps (and allows other services to join). All users are welcome to join, ask questions, or share information.

I am not sure if I am doing everything correctly, please critique with my forums goal in mind.

MY PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: To be top 10 (5 is better) within Google and Yahoo search results when a user queries the words as "USMC FORUMS", "U.S. MARINE FORUMS", or "MARINE CORPS FORUMS" for example.

My forum is not showing up at all when typing these critical keywords. Please help me in anyway that you can!


Here are some statistics on my site:
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[Joe Ward]

In order to rank for those terms on your homepage, you need to get them into the homepage title.

Why not the following as your title instead of what you have now:

U.S. Marine Corps Forums (USMC) - TheFirst2Fight

The above allows for all the terms you specified as targeting to get coverage in the title, with a little re-ordering. However, by building inbound links with anchor text with each of your term variations you should easily get ranked, and may move up the rankings over time.

I noticed that your template is a little heavy, particularly give that you have a lot of excess stuff available to guests/search engines that could be removed. I would axe the top 10 stats, shoutbox, recent threads, and much of that stuff for "guests" only. That way the search engines can zero in on the content without being distracted by all that stuff. On the guest side of things, it's best to scale back all of that stuff.

Check out the following two sources. I think you have great keyword coverage, you just need a little tweaking and you should be able to do well.

Your Site Review - Stuff to Do First

Briansol's Ultimate Guide to vBSEO

Remember to track your long tail growth as well:

What is the Search Long Tail? - vBulletin SEO Forums

Measuring Your Long Tail - vBulletin SEO Forums

[viruslived]

Okay, I changed my forum's homepage title to exactly the title in which you provided! Thank you very much. I did some recent research on the Google search and actually discovered a lot of SEO progress... I made it to the top of page #2!!! I am very excited about this, if you have any more information in which may be a critical SEO fix on my forum (and will boost my search results to page #1), let me know.

As of right now I am fixing the guest settings and making them more "bot friendly"

Thanks again!
- Chris

[viruslived]

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

In order to rank for those terms on your homepage

You do not want me to "re-edit" the title attributes back into forum and thread templates do you?

I read that it is considered a bad thing to have your forums title on every page (does not rank well with Google).

I am just making sure you didn't mean on every page.

- Hompage Title Changed -

[Joe Ward]

No, I would not recommend adding the forum title, back into every page title. I think that is not a good idea for long tail optimization, which is exactly what will ultimately lead you to greater success.

[viruslived]

Thanks for the quick response!

How often would you say Google refreshes indexing? Because I just checked today and I am on page #2... I was lost into the hundreds of pages just a few days ago.

[Joe Ward]

New content can get added in hours. There will constantly be shuffling as not only your page status changes, but others (to which it is compared) change as well.

But besides just watching a few terms, focus on the long tail, and its growth.

[viruslived]

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

New content can get added in hours. There will constantly be shuffling as not only your page status changes, but others (to which it is compared) change as well.

But besides just watching a few terms, focus on the long tail, and its growth.

I will most definitely research my forum's long tail! Thank you for all your help. I got rid of most auxiliary modules and add-ons for guest usergroups as well.

[Joe Ward]

Good start. I would consider moving all of the left col. navigation blocks to the right side.

[viruslived]

Do you mean just the Navigation module? or the entire left module column?

[Joe Ward]

All the blocks in the left column.

[viruslived]

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

However, by building inbound links with anchor text with each of your term variations you should easily get ranked, and may move up the rankings over time.

Hey Joe,

I was wondering what you were meaning by the quote above. How do I go about setting up inbound links with anchor text?

I fixed the column by the way!

Thanks,
- Chris

[Joe Ward]

Nice to see you making improvements. I was thinking you could do that throughout your entire site.

BTW - I think your new title would be best on the homepage, and then perhaps varied on your forumhome page by adding "Forum" or "Community" to differentiate it.

I hope that you have also reviewed the following to see if anything is applicable to you:
Your Site Review - Stuff to Do First

[Joe Ward]

Re: Inbound links with Anchor Text

Anchor text is the text that hides the link on a page. So you want to use relevant keywords there.

vbseo.com (link by itself)

Definitive SEO Solution for vBulletin (link with targeted keyword anchor text)

[viruslived]

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

Nice to see you making improvements. I was thinking you could do that throughout your entire site.

What is the reason in having all modules on only one side of a page? I thought it would be a good idea to split them up across both sides so members can see more modules per screen.

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

BTW - I think your new title would be best on the homepage, and then perhaps varied on your forumhome page by adding "Forum" or "Community" to differentiate it.

I just realized what I did wrong, thanks... For some reason I thought I placed it on the index page. Will update! This is essentially a way of getting two solid titles on the main pages of the site indexed correct?

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

Anchor text is the text that hides the link on a page. So you want to use relevant keywords there.

Thank you for clearing that up for me. Whenever possible I will use this strategy.

Also:
I definitely have checked out the site review page, very good information. I will probably need to re-read it a few more times to make sure I've made correct changes.

Back to the drawing board,

- Chris