Review Please

Joe suggested that I post my forum here for review. So I will.

Thanks,

Matt

Boating and Fishing Forum - FairWeather

I like your logo.

How much traffic do you get for "FairWeather"? How important is it to you to rank for that? I would remove it from your title and leave just "Boating and Fishing Forum".

You should convert your horizontal navigation to text, instead of the images you have now:

• Add rel=nofollow to the donate link since you have to login to do it.
• Consider changing "Burner's Gear" to "Our Fishing Gear", etc.
• Change Chatroom to "Fishing Chat" or "Fishing Talk", etc.

How important is ranking for "burning reel" to you? I would consider unlinking your footer link to The Burning Reel 2007 ™, or changing it to "The Burning Reel - Boating & Fishing Forum 2007".

You should put a vBA content block on your homepage that describes your forum and uses several keywords specifically related to your site. Consider linking some of the keywords directly into an appropriate forum, thread, or other content page.

Could you move your pictures out of the "/coppermine/" directory and into one named "/pictures/", or "fishing-pictures", etc? The folder should preferably have a keyword rich name, rather than the name of the software used to host the gallery.

Add rel=nofollow to your chat link, since it goes to a Flash only page.

You should duplicate the horizontal navigation that you have on your forum, in your store page. Right now, only the logo links back to the forum. It would be better to have it more interlinked:
The Burning Reel

Is there any way to embed some of the marine forecast data into your site? If not, you should consider linking your navigation link for it to a content page on your site. The content page can introduce the marine forecast with some keyword rich text before providing the link to send them off to a 3rd party site.

I think it would be good (for usability) to add a "Forum" link into your yellow horizontal navigation area. On the homepage, it allows visitors to click through it more quickly.

I would convert your welcome text in your forum into an image. However, at the very minimum, I would rewrite it to better describe your forum with keyword rich content.

For your forum names/descriptions:

• If the forum name is very generic, consider not providing a description at all. Consider:
  
  Burners Bar - A Chat Section Just for us Burners!
• I would drop the word "forum" from any forum name that has it.
• Where you use state abbreviations, you might want to expand to the full state name.
• Get rid of stuff like "discuss", "A Place to Discuss", "discussion of" in your forum descriptions. Jump right into a description that does not include non-valuable filler terms as much as possible.
• In general, most of your forum descriptions could use some work, revising.

You should consider running our Relevant Replacements. Here is a tutorial:
[How to] Setup Relevant Replacements with vBSEO

I would not repeat your forum title in the titles on each of your thread pages. Instead, I would remove the "forum title" part and leave it to be just the title of the thread.

My preference is to enable our option to replace the showthread link with the vBSEO permalink.



You might want to move your gallery box up to the top to attract more attention.

Wow, those are some great ideas Joe!!

Not really sure how to accomplish all of them but some I can easily handle

But Thanks!!!

Hi Matt,

I recommend you work with a freelance consultant, if you are interested in making these changes. Trying contacting user "Loco", Brandon Shelley, who does work in this area.

Joe or anyone else,

I added the Revelant Replacements but I really didn't like the way it looked. So I changed the font color to make it blend in with the background. This won't cause any problems as the search engines will still see it correct?

matt

You mean you can't see the text because it's the same color as the background?

If so, don't do that. Just remove them if they are not going to be visible. I would imagine bots can read CSS well enough to know if the text is visible.

Hidden text was a very old-old school way of "gaming" the search engines, that finally resulted in penalties after a significant history of abuse. I'm sure you recall finding pages that had several pages of nothing at the bottom until you highlighted with the mouse to reveal a bunch of spam keywords.

Joe,

If you don't mind taking a look again, are the relevant replacements in the right place? I think it looks better now that I change the size of the font.

www.theburningreel.com/forums

That's ok, but I would prefer it being above your welcome message (which I hope you convert to an image still).

You could move it above that, or even go so far as to move it above the horizontal thread navigation.

Yes I'm working on all that stuff right now.. just learning as I go!!

I have followed the steps that are layouted in your link, but I can't figure out exacly where to put it. This is where I have it.

Here's where I put it on the FORUMDISPLAY Page..

HTML Code:

[simpleversion]"></script></if>
</head>
<body>
$header 
$navbar 
<center><FONT SIZE=1><!--VBSEO_RR_1--></FONT></center><br />
<if condition="$show['forumslist']">
<!-- sub-forum list  -->
<table class="tborder" cellpadding="$stylevar[cellpadding]" cellspacing="$stylevar[cellspacing]" border="0" width="100%" align="center" style="border-bottom-width:0px">
<tr> 

Should I put it somewhere else?

Joe,

I have changed my guest login to an image (figured that the only one I need to change is guest as that's what spiders will be).

I have also moved my replacements, let me know if you think this is better.

www.theburningreel.com/forums

Good work.