Only good for public forums?

[kwill]

Hi, I'm thinking about getting vbseo, but my forums are available to registered users only. Can I make google crawl my site and will vbseo help me?

[Mert Gökçeimam]

Hello Ken ,

Google cannot index threads that require registration therefore i don't think vBSEO can work for you. However you should consider opening some of your forums to guest access which can bring visitors to your site so your board can grow faster.

[Joe Ward]

To get Google to index your content, you need to have at least some of your forum content open to guests.

If everything is members only, then vBSEO would not help you with traffic, although your members may very well appreciate the more human readable/user friendly URLs we provide.

[Martyn]

Would be ideal to get public forums, forums which are open, i guses it depends totally on what your forum is about, there is also the option to make bots act as members, but again, this could cause alot of isuses when getting searched people would have to register and some may not bother...

[kwill]

Thanks for the replies. It's a neighborhood site. I don't want the forums completely public. That way I have "some" control over who sees what and I do understand the implications of cached pages. I'm not really looking to make money, I'm just trying to figure out the best way to let people search my keywords and find my site. Some people in the community don't even know the site exists. I'm not really a noob and I'm doing all of the things I should otherwise, but I'm really interested in vbseo, because it seems to be the standard. So I'm trying to figure out if there is a good reason to get involved with it. ken

[Martyn]

I'm recently starting a community site for my local town, you should think about making it public, to try get higher rank in your neighborhood's name in google, you could just make a couple of extra registered only catagorys...??

[Joe Ward]

Thanks for the replies. It's a neighborhood site. I don't want the forums completely public. That way I have "some" control over who sees what and I do understand the implications of cached pages. I'm not really looking to make money, I'm just trying to figure out the best way to let people search my keywords and find my site. Some people in the community don't even know the site exists. I'm not really a noob and I'm doing all of the things I should otherwise, but I'm really interested in vbseo, because it seems to be the standard. So I'm trying to figure out if there is a good reason to get involved with it. ken

Hi Ken - I think you'll like vBSEO. However, I really don't believe you need it.

If you really want the rewritten URLS (with keywords) because it will be more user friendly for your users, then that will be of benefit to you even without the search advantages.

Some of our other features can be good for usability alone also, like our External link retrieval.

Someone posts a link to an outside site, and the title of that site gets listed as the anchor text instead of the address link itself. Post any link here to try it.

The interest you expressed is having your forum be found for local community keywords. Depending on the size of your community this may be a little easier than you might expect.

Make a list of all the possible words someone from your community might reasonable expect to search for (and that your site would make a good match).

Then try to get those terms covered on your forum homepage. Your welcome message, your forum title, your footer area, and your navigation links will give you great coverage on these terms.

Then try getting yourself links from a few well known directories for a jump start.

Try building a few links by finding other sites related to your community who would be willing to link to you. You may find small community sites to get very generous in this regard if your forum is a quality site they don't mind sending their visitors to. Remember to choose the keywords for your link carefully so that they help you rank for those terms.

Getting keyword coverage on your homepage and doing a link campaign will lead you in the right direction to getting traffic for locally related keywords, even without opening up your forums and maxing them out with vBSEO.

Hope that helps.