Hello from mahendraji owner of http://www.freerecipeforum.com

Hello All--

Just wanted to say Hi, as new member of vBSEO community. I am the owner of forum www.freerecipeforum.com

Thank you

Hello Mahendra

Welcome to vBSEO.com!

Welcome to vbseo! Have you installed already?

Hi Brian--

Yeah its been installed, please check now. http://www.freerecipeforum.com

can you please suggest your expert comment on what optimization you think I should do to drive traffic and search Crawlability for my forum (specific for recipe,food,cooking etc).

Micheal, thanks for the installation and comment on support, really appreciate. Will submit my quesiton on forum you mentioned to understand what else I can do to drive load/traffic and search towards my forum.

Thank you..

Not a problem!

Originally Posted by mahendraji

can you please suggest your expert comment on what optimization you think I should do to drive traffic .

Sure

1. Disable the archive: [How To] Completely Turn Off the vBulletin Archive
2. create a favicon. You still have the generic vB icon. The chef hat would be nice!
3. You have 5 google verification meta tags. Do you have 5 seperate webmasters accounts? Also, i recommend using the blank html file over the meta tag. Saves weight, and no one can see it, plus saves a template edit every time.
4. Move your CSS to the file system: [How To] Completely Turn Off the vBulletin Archive
5. [How To] Replace Showpost Links with Permalinks - Max Out Search Engine Crawling Efficiency
6. validate your template. Mostly CAPS errors (xhtml is all lower case) and missing single element closing slash ie, <meta ... /> and changing some & to &amp; in Forum Manager. (vb doesn't convert it, you have to hard-code) http://validator.w3.org/check?verbos...um.com%2F%23tb
7. Your Recipe forum has non-recipe content in it. chat, cooking questions, etc should be somewhere else. stay on topic. Same thing with vegan recipes.. why is it not in the recipe category? 2 beverage forums? it's a bit confusion. Re-arrange some stuff.
8. tweetboard is covering a bit of the left column. I'd make the outer wrapper in the CSS a bit thinner so that it doesn't lap on to your actual forum content.
9. Increase your long tail - remove forum title from page titles. [How To] Remove Forum Title from Thread Pages for Long Tail Optimization / Increased Thread Title Relevancy
10. Change your logo to CSS with an H1 image replacement:
    in header, find:
    
    Code:

    <!-- logo -->
    <a name="top"></a>
    <table border="0" width="100%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" align="center">
    <tr>
        <td align="center"><a href="http://www.freerecipeforum.com/"><img src="images/misc/vbulletin3_logo_white.gif" border="0" alt="Free Recipes Forum" /></a></td>
        <td align="right" id="header_right_cell">
            &nbsp;
        </td>
    </tr>
    </table>
    <!-- /logo -->

    replace with:
    
    Code:

    <!-- logo -->
    <div id="top">
        <h1><a href="/">Free Recipe Forum</a></h1>
    </div>
    <!-- /logo -->

    and enter the following into the bottom of the Main CSS area (extra blocks):
    
    Code:

    #top h1 {
        text-indent: -99999px;
    }
    
    #top h1 a { 
        display: block;
        margin: 0 auto 0 auto;
        height: 190px;
        background: url(/images/misc/vbulletin3_logo_white.gif) no-repeat center center;
    }

11. In your welcome header, remove the h1 around the greeting.
    
    Code:

    <h1 style="font-size: 12px;">Hello Chef,</h1>

    That's not logical nor is it a semantic heading. It's pure mis-use of a heading. See this thread for more info on how to use them better: [How To] Add H1 Tags to your vBulletin Templates for Long Tail Search Optimization
12. Post at least a couple threads in every forum. You have several Empty forums. Fill 'em or Kill 'em.
13. Only include showthread and forumdisplay in your sitemap for maximum focus on your true content.
14. Consider setting up custom BB codes for heading tags. The style of your forum will allow very nicely to style your recipies. ie, make an [title]TITLE[/title] bb code that converts to <h1>title</h1> and [ing]Ingredients[/ing] that converts to an <h2>ingridents</h2> and so on. You can have a nice structured output with simple BB code. Then, make a little FAQ post instructing users how to format their posts using the bbcode format. You cna even style it by adding a class to it. ie, [title]TITLE[/title] bb code that converts to <h1 class="posttitle">title</h1> and then have .posttitle { font-weight: bold; font-size: 14px; text-decoration: underline; } and so forth by adding the custom clas sinto the custom CSS at the bottom of Main CSS.
15. match your ads. The top ad is great. The bottom ad should be formatted like the top ad.

Over all your site looks pretty good. Get these tweaks together and then work on getting content together. post post post is the next step!

Hello, welcome to vBSEO.com!!

Welcome to vBSEO.com!