MabiGuru.com gets vBSEO-ized

Konkon · #1 02-25-2008, 06:42 PM

Hello,

Just like Tor's FlyffWorld.com - Pretty Damn Large Forum, Testing VBSEO, MabiGuru.com is a fansite for an online game called Mabinogi. The site is around 2 months+ old has been receiving an upward trend in traffic lately (1800 uniques today) so I decided to take advantage and immediately installed vBSEO.

The site itself is poorly ranked in search engines such as Google which is partly my fault for doing no optimization (That's because I am illiterate when it comes to that stuff). My goal is to be the top result when "Mabinogi fansite" is searched in Google. Currently, I am at 7-8.

I will post some updates about this as time goes by and we'll see what happens. Wish me luck!

I'll be browsing around the forums here to learn more about SEO. I've found a couple of useful stuff and I am implementing everything I learn immediately.

Tips in helping me reach my goal are most welcome!

Joe Ward · #2 02-27-2008, 12:29 PM

Your site looks nice. You should try using our relevant replacements and converting the welcome header to an image.

If you want your homepage to rank for "Mabinogi fansite", you need to get some text on the page that uses those terms. I suggest adding a keyword rich welcome area of text that stays at the top all the time.

You should also use those terms as anchor text somewhere on your site, preferably in the navigation links to the homepage, but you may find success simply using it in your signature (full time).

Review your forum names and descriptions. Try not to optimize for MabiGuru. Your site brand will not get as much search traffic as more general game related terms unless it becomes very famous. Try to determine all highly searched terms, related specifically to the game and get them included somewhere at least in the forum descriptions, but preferably within the forum names when you can.

Identifying forum names that might be too generic is simple. Just look at it and ask yourself could it just as easily be placed on another site about photography, or cars, or cooking and still make sense in context? For example "Spam Zone". We could expect to find that on any type of site.

Is there a creative name you could come up with for this forum, that relates somehow to the game, even if metaphorical, or a humorous comparison?

Maybe a game character based name such as "Zelda's OffTopic Zone". It basically means the same thing, fits your theme better, and adds a potentially valuable related keyword. Note: I used "Zelda" since I am not familiar with any of the character names in your game.

Konkon · #3 02-28-2008, 08:31 AM

Thanks for the tips Joe. I'll definitely implement most of those soon. I am using the "Improved welcome headers" script I downloaded from vb.org though and I'm not sure if it applies.

So you mean that by simply adding some good terms in my signature would already help my search engine traffic?

Joe Ward · #4 02-28-2008, 09:13 PM

If you are targeting specific keyword phrase, having those terms used as anchor text in links posted within your signature throughout your site could provide a small advantage, but a worthwhile one. For best effect, ensure that you do this on other forums (as long as it's allowed as a part of their rules).

Konkon · #5 03-04-2008, 06:07 PM

I was wondering if you could give me tips on how to increase my site's ranking whenever I search for "Mabinogi Fansite". As you can see I am badly beaten at #9 (MabiGuru.com). Two of my competition fansites are #1 and #2 and they don't even have an SEO software like I do.

mabinogi fansite - Google Search

Joe Ward · #6 03-04-2008, 08:05 PM

I sent you some tips today via PM. If you don't mind, please post them here so other users can review them as well.

Konkon · #7 03-04-2008, 08:13 PM

Thanks for the tips. I'd be more than happy to post it here.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

There are a bunch of things you can try. Here are some suggestions that *might* help:

Change your title set in the vB control panel from "MabinogiGuru" to "Mabinogi Guru Fansite". Include the space to allow Mabinogi to combine with Fansite, rather than looking like 1 word "MabinogiGuru".
The above will cause the title of the site to change, and also the link in the footer, so you actually have anchor text pointing at the site that includes both terms you desire to rank better for.
Consider adding a new sub-forum called "Mabinogi Fansite" and make it #1 at the top of the forum list. Either create a few starter threads in there, or move a few threads from another forum to get it started. The first post in there should be a welcome message such as "Welcome to our Mabinogi Fansite", and the terms Mabinogi and fansite should occur a few times within the welcome post text.
Find 2 to 3 other sub-forum descriptions that you can insert the word "fansite" into. It doesn't need to be linked. It just needs to get inserted into those descriptive text areas, so that the word appears on the page in multiple contexts, with a higher density.
Also try getting the words "fan", "fans", "fan site" (with the space), etc within the descriptions to show variations (or branches) of the same term.
Update your meta keywords and description to include those terms.
Consider including a link within your signature that links to perhaps your "welcome to fansite..." message (see above) in the new "Mabinogi Fansite" sub-forum. This will help to start optimizing that particular page to receive the traffic.
Lastly, but very important, is to try to get links from other sites that link back to you using the word fansite and other variations.