SEO

My site is a social networking script integrated with vBulletin and the vBulletin forum is really a major part I want to promote, and that's why I purchased vBSEO(I haven't installed it, want to wait for 3.2 Gold).

Could you please have a review on my site?

vBulletin is open but most other pages are password protected.

I did some of the things in the 'Stuff to Do First' list long time ago but nothing seems to have changed in terms of traffic from organic search.

Which things did you do the from "stuff to do first"?
Your Site Review - Stuff to Do First

Let us know, and then myself or another member of the vBSEO Total Support Team will take a look at your site.

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Thank you so much. Here are the things I did long time ago:

1. Removed "Powered by vBulletin" from page title;
2. Rewrote the site homepage and Forum homepage welcome messages with relevant keywords;
3. Removed "forum title" from the page title of sub-forum and thread display pages;
4. Changed some of the forum names and descriptions with targeted keywords;
5. Switched to less competitive multi-keyword search phrases. Those are the keywords found from Google keyword tool that are of high search volume but low bidding

I expected to see some improvement of Google and Yahoo organic traffic but it actually started declining a bit and then back to what it was. Since I got literally no traffic from organic search I had to buy Google Adwords which gives me around 55% of the traffic.

Would really appreciate it if you guys can do some diagnosis.

some things i'd suggest:

• Change your title. It's too 'spammy'. Describe the PAGE, not the site. Don't keyword stuff it.
• if the forum is what you're trying to promote and focus on, make it an easier to find item on the nav. i had to do a quick-scan 3 times before i found it. I expected it #1, #2, or #last, but it wasn't there.
• your home page tells me the site is about hiring over-seas workers. I go to the forums and i see stuff about living there, playing arcade games, and watching tv. I think this is the critical flaw of why your forum isn't being very successful. You have a great niche to work upon, but your forum is 95%+ off-topic. As someone looking to hire over-seas workers, I could care less about the city, living abroad, clubs, games, an arcade, or the phillipines in general. I'm there to meet potential laborers and make a hire for some work i have.

I would set your forum up into 3 main sections and focus on tight content:

1. Employers
   1. How to hire an overseas worker/posting jobs
   2. payment methods, legal/tax issues, etc
   3. what to look for in a laborer
2. Workers
   1. Finding work
   2. how to make sure you get paid
   3. legal/tax issues
3. link to job boards (forum redirect)
4. Site/articles
   1. General articles/information on overseas working
   2. site help (how to post an ad, etc etc)
5. Members' Corner
   1. lounge/chat/anything goes
   2. Multi-media (pics, vids, etc)
   3. Politics/religion etc etc
   4. Filipino topics

Perhaps you can expand the subforms better as you know the niche far better than I, but I would keep the forum to that and NOTHING else.

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Who should I host with?

Thanks very much.

Do you mean the tile of site homepage or the tile of Forum homepage, or both? I admit it is spammy. It wasn't spammy before but I noticed once of my competitors' site has very spammy titles and always shows up in first or second place in search engine so I decided to do the same.

I once put the Forum the No. 2 link from the left, which indeed increased the overall traffic to the forum. However I found out while that didn't increase my organic traffic, because of that the conversation rate(User registration rate of the site) noticeably decreased. Since this site is a Social Networking+Forum, so I need to focus on getting users as well. So what I did is to move the forum back to the far end and promote the Forum in the welcome message and internal news to make sure people would know about the Forum once they registered.

I have around 12% conversation rate from Google AdWords. I think that's a good rate. I only hope more people will find my Forum from organic search engines. Since my Forum is pretty much the only part on my site that is not password protected, so I guess that's the only part Google can crawl (except my homepage) on my site.

The site is not about hiring people. It's an online community for the overseas Filipino workers who want to meet each other, and talk about whatever they are interested in. So music, sports and games are legitimate topics.

I do agree what you said about reorganizing some of the forum topics to make it more 'overseas worker specific'. I think that's something I will plan to do shortly.

if this is the case, think about why i thought it was what it isn't. You shouldn't have to correct me on what your forum/site is about.

your keywords, title, etc tend to lead me to believe i can find a worker there (since i'm not in the Philippines)

Thanks. I know what you mean. I will modify the keywords accordingly. I suppose you refer to the title keywords of vBulletin home, right?