another success story

bernard · #1 03-13-2008, 12:14 PM

For a long time, my forum was just a hobby - built with phpBB on a site cobbled together with a few other free scripts and not promoted hardly at all. It was just a subject that I had a strong interest in.

I was supremely surpised one day when I was contacted out of the blue by a company that was interested in advertising on my pitiful site. Anyway, I decided to upgrade the site and run with it (advertising revenue) and see where it lead.

So I revamped the site with vBulletin, vBAdvanced, vBSEO, a professionally designed logo and forum template/color scheme. I also started some earnest efforts marketing the site for quality backlinks and relationships with related non-profit groups.

There were a ton of changes made all at once, so it's difficult to discern what portion of the site's current success can be directly attributed to vBSEO, but one thing I find telling is that the site has finally reached #1 on two particular keyphrases where I am competing against a bunch of national non-profit organizations with much more favorable PR/link profiles.

Joe Ward · #2 03-13-2008, 12:31 PM

I think you are doing wonderful with your site. While vBSEO is definitely going to contribute to your success in the search engines, all the other proactive stuff you have done is definitely helping in the SEO area as well.

One thing I like about your forum is how clean it is. The whiteness of the template plus the clean logo reminds me of the medical field, so I think your template communicates "professionalism", i.e. "a professional place to get information about epilepsy".

I love that you removed the "last post" links from your forum homepage and from the sub-forum thread lists. I think this is fantastic, getting rid of all of these unnecessary links. I know that it does change the typical forum style used on most vBulletin forums, but it would also be my method of choice.

It reduces links and gets of rid of strange text on those pages that typically accompany the unique usernames of your members.

You should work on converting your welcome message to an image since it is appearing at the top of every page, and thereby skewing the content of each page.

I think you should try using our Relevant Replacements similarly to how we do it here at the vBSEO forums, so that you can get a H1 tag onto the title of all of your threads.

Note: Your forum titles are not optimized for SEO at all. They are very lacking in keywords. However, you were smart in selecting a rewrite option that did not include the forum titles in the URL.

However, the forum titles till appear on all of your forum and thread pages, so they are important. I think you should strongly consider doing a complete review of all of your forum titles and descriptions. Doing so might allow you to start ranking for a lot more terms that you might expect.

Here is one strategy that I devised recently that might be appropriate for you:
Strategy for Optimizing Keywords in Your vBulletin Forum Title and Descriptions

When making any changes, remember to review closely what you already rank for. Most likely you will not want to make any changes that would stop you from getting that current stream of traffic. An example might be changing a forum title that is actually generating you traffic on the sub-forum page, or within a thread listed in that sub-forum, etc.

Are you using the Google Webmaster Tools?
Google Webmaster Tools - Recommended for All vBSEO Customers

bernard · #3 03-13-2008, 03:51 PM

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