What could I improve? laptopgpsworld.com (since Oct 2007)

I'd like some expert feedback on my site: laptopgpsworld.com

Started 5 months ago (October 2007)

vBSEO was installed almost from the start

vBSEO skin and RR implemented few days ago

What could I improve?

Thanks much in advance!

• Customize your template more for your niche.
• Work on rewriting your welcome message with relevant text.
• Consider replacing your showpost link with permalink (a vBSEO option).

Thanks, Joe,

1) Will work on it at a later date

2) Will do in the next few days

3 I just did it. Does it have some SEO benefit, or why would this be your preference?

3) Replacing showpost with permalink is my personal preference; however, it certainly does making the search engine crawling process more efficient, and I believe it will also yield a higher %-age of traffic producing pages into the index for your forum.

Thanks for the explanation, Joe.

I will rewrite the welcome message tonight, and over the next week or two I will research how templates can be customized.

6 months have passed since I posted my critique request. I think I have addressed all the above recommendations, and more.

Is there anything else I could improve at this point?

Tnx!

How have you done since the update. Any improvement in traffic, or other factors?

Joe, the forum is only 11 months old. There have been so many things happening, it is impossible to tell which change affected what. The traffic has been growing steadily since the site opened. Now it is at around 1,100 unique daily visitors, and still growing.

I've run out of ideas, so I came back here to VBSEO.com to read and learn more.

You have done extremely well. I love the icons you've included in your welcome message (which is also an image).

You might try experimenting with removing even more content for guests. I had a test forum setup just for the purpose of eliminating as much non-content text (for guests only) as possible. This is NOT a forum that is maintained and it is had no design applied.

But it might give you an idea of some areas that you could consider eliminating to tighten up your content for the search engines even more:
Amazon Kindle FAQ

Thanks for the link, and the idea. I'll have a better look at what else could be removed, especially from the eyes of search engines. I have a sub-forum dedicated to site-related announcements/suggestions/feedback. None of the threads/postings there have any value to people searching for the topic of my forum. I just blocked the whole forum section in robots.txt.

If you make any further changes, let us know here so that we can take another look to see what you've done.

Several months have passed since my last update. The site, as of today (July 1, 2009) is almost 19 months old. The traffic has kept rising steadily (June = over 67k unique visitors).

The most recent changes include the elimination of all unessential forum features, all unessential hyperlinks, and most unessential images. I even removed my own website logo(!) image, and now I only have a plain text as my logo. ;)

This Statics is really amazing :)
Keep up the good work

Thanks marco1. My website logo & my background image had to come back due to the popular demand, LOL. However, I managed to find more unessential features which I was able to remove from the forum home page: Last Post, Threads, and Posts columns. I feel those three columns contain no information of any value to visitors, and the removal of them simplifies the look and the navigation of the home page. The removal of the links that were in the Last Post column will result in more PR juice flowing to my forums instead - and that's were I want it. :)

I managed to reduce the number of links on my forum home page to 27 inbound links and 0 (zero) outbound links. Originally I had well over 100 links on the page, including a few outbounds.

Here I'm again, updating this thread exactly one year since the last post...

What have I've been up to lately?

1. I switched from a shared to a VPS server (I don't want to $pend on a dedicated)
2. I've kept looking for ways to remove unessential features and image files

The past couple of weeks I spent modifying and testing vB4, but I gave up. It seems so much slower than vB 3.8. So I'm sticking with 3.8 for now. Can anyone suggest anything unnecessary I could remove from my site to make it faster? :)