Any advice on some SEO for my vBulletin site?

[drjarmin]

Hello

I am new to vBulletin, having my first BB on line for about 2 months.

One thing I have noticed is that it isn't doing too well regarding Google rankings - despite being for a fairly specialist subject.

I have read some books on SEO and they have suggested alt tags, <H1> tags, meta tags etc.

Can we do this sort of customisation with our vBulletin site? I am a bit afraid to play with the templates section as I don't want to potentially break my site.

My site is: www.LantauChat.com . It is simply a website for a community of people that live on Lantau Island, the biggest Island in Hong Kong. Like I said, fairly specialist. Anyone with any experience, tips or tricks or books to recomment I would be most grateful!

Thanks

[Floris]

I recommend to read up on http://www.seomoz.org/

[MRGTB]

Alt tags should be used on images, not only for better markup purposes, but also it helps search engines like "Google Images", to index your images better. Never have empty alt tags like (alt=""), thats bad SEO! You should use the name of the image, in the alt tag also. If you upload an image called baby.gif, add Baby in the alt tag as well. While search engines can't index the image name as such for seo reasons, they can index the alt tag name.

You should also try to avoid having the same description for each page you create in the "Meta Description" tags, same with with "Keyword tags" also. The lazy way, is to just use the exact same description and keywords for every page you create, try to avoid doing that and make each page a little different in these tags.

Yes, H1, H2, H3 tags do help. The only problem though - is most search engines will also grab text from the page also in the description under the link they display. I use the meta tag "noarchive" that all the 3 major search engines support. Google, MSN, Yahoo. If you use that Meta Tag, only what you enter into the Meta Description will be displayed. So you can control the description in search engines for your pages.

Concentrate on Keywords in the page text you create. Try to include good keywords that are relevant to what your talking about. That way ads will be much more targeted to the page. And try to add the most important keywords at the start of the article.

You should do some browsing and read about SEO, there are lots of things you can do to help your site become much more search engine friendly. Having a sitemap.xml file is another good thing to do, and then add a line to the robots.txt file to point robots to it, so they find it easy and faster. Also block files and images in your robots files that are of no importance, so you lead search engines faster to what you want indexing.

Another thing Google recommends, is not to use underscores in page titles like "blue_moon.html". But instead use the minus sign like this "blue-moon". Also there is page importance, if your site is called Cars.com. And you create pages on different makes etc. Don't have each page title starting with "Cars - Then Page Name". Instead always put the page name first, so pages you create have titles like this: "Ford - Cars", "Dodge - Cars". Instead of "Cars - Dodge", Cars - Ford". When ranking a page, they tend to rank in highness, based on the first few keywords found in the title. So it's important to have that article title first before site domain name.

[drjarmin]

Thanks for all that advice.

My question really centers around how I can make changes, say to alt tags, within vBulletin. I don't want to start updating source code do I?

[Dilly]

You'll need to edit templates.

[pranaysanghavi]

seobook.com

all that you need. period.

[SoftDux]

how does one get a sitemap.xml generated by VB?

[Mazinger]

@MRGTB, Very nice tips.

Could you talk more about the 'noarchive' tag?

[MRGTB]

The noarchive tag tells Google, MSN, and Yahoo etc. To stop caching pages in search results. For example. I still have some pages cached before I added that tag, but they will start to be removed soon from results.

Look at this page of results for my site: http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=site%3Aaquariumfish.me&meta=

Take note how there is no "cached" page link, and the description under each Link is exactly what it says in my meta description (so I control it). No page text is grabbed as part of the description by accident to fill that description line in to the max allowed. Which will happen if you don't use the noarchive tag, and could be anything thats not that good as a description.

Using the noarchive tag does that. People are forced to visit your site also via the direct link, rather than being able to click the cached page links instead (which I've read does not get registered as a uneak hit), if they use the cache link. Sometimes a cached picture of a site also does not look good. And your site can look awful, as CSS is not grabbed in cached pages sometimes that controls the layout.

What you should remember though, this tag tells Google etc, to remove cached pages next time they do updates. So if you use this tag, and already have 1000 pages indexed prior to using it, they will start to be removed as cached pages.

The tag is supported by the 3 major search engines, so there is no issues in using it. However, some people use the tag to hide things, and it is abused. Google etc are aware of this, so never use the tag for that purpose or your site will be black listed.

If you want to know more about the noarchive tag, it is widley covered in google search results.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35306
http://www.ezau.com/latest/articles/no-archive.shtml

[Mazinger]

Very Good, thanks again!

I actually wanted to show the the meta tag as description and not any text else in the page while page is being archived.

Is this possible?

[MRGTB]

what do you mean by page still being archived?

[Mazinger]

Still appear cached copy of it at Google.

[MRGTB]

Oh right, I know what you mean now. No I'm not sure if there is a way to do that.

[xjuliox]

You can save some trouble about SEO and get vBSEO. I use it and i am extremely happy with the product.

[vBSeed]

How is vBSEO? Is it a good solution?

[xjuliox]

There's alot of mixed opinions about vbseo. You can searched the forum here for vbseo topics already done. Then you can decide if it is right for you.

I use it and i am really happy with the results.

[---MAD---]

The noarchive tag tells Google, MSN, and Yahoo etc. To stop caching pages in search results. For example. I still have some pages cached before I added that tag, but they will start to be removed soon from results.

Look at this page of results for my site: http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=site%3Aaquariumfish.me&meta=

Take note how there is no "cached" page link, and the description under each Link is exactly what it says in my meta description (so I control it). No page text is grabbed as part of the description by accident to fill that description line in to the max allowed. Which will happen if you don't use the noarchive tag, and could be anything thats not that good as a description.

Using the noarchive tag does that. People are forced to visit your site also via the direct link, rather than being able to click the cached page links instead (which I've read does not get registered as a uneak hit), if they use the cache link. Sometimes a cached picture of a site also does not look good. And your site can look awful, as CSS is not grabbed in cached pages sometimes that controls the layout.

What you should remember though, this tag tells Google etc, to remove cached pages next time they do updates. So if you use this tag, and already have 1000 pages indexed prior to using it, they will start to be removed as cached pages.

The tag is supported by the 3 major search engines, so there is no issues in using it. However, some people use the tag to hide things, and it is abused. Google etc are aware of this, so never use the tag for that purpose or your site will be black listed.

If you want to know more about the noarchive tag, it is widley covered in google search results.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35306
http://www.ezau.com/latest/articles/no-archive.shtml
I don't quite get what you mean by abused. Can you give me/us an example of what not to do just so we don't get in any problems?

Cheers.

[Chris Stewart]

I love vBSEO. I use it and have had excellent results.

[vBSeed]

Does it require any modifications of your vB skins?

[MRGTB]

vbseo can answer them questions for you: http://www.vbseo.com

[Mazinger]

@MRGTB or anyone else,

My partner's website appear in Google search without the www prefix. What could be the reason and how to fix that?

[MRGTB]

Maybe, not sure though. When he creates his webiste and adds links on the pages he creates that leads to other pages. Like writing an menu in html pages.

He is using http://site.com instead of http://www.site.com

So google follows those link, maybe also he has 301 redirect activated to point all http://www to http:// instead in .htaccess file.

I do that with my mrGTB website. To point all: "http://" to "http://www". So I don't have the same page on both types.

Try this link: http://mrgtb.com

it leads you too http://www. instead.

[Mazinger]

So, how to ask google to recrawl and update the links?

[MRGTB]

you just have to wait for google to do that itself in time

[Profaders]

Yes, I'm a little p*ssed off too in that I have other sites using non-vb forums that are doing much better in 4 months than my vb site has done in 3 years. One principal reason for this is that the other sites have very coherent and friendly urls. As a result, I am able to manage them much better through Google Webmasters. And the rub is that the better sites have local content, and the vb site has global content.

MR GTB, I note you promote vbseo (and indirectly, the ludicrous price of this software), but I also note that both your signature sites are not even RANKED by Google... go away, LOL!

And here's the other rub - Vbulletin and their Meta generator tag - using XHTML cms I am offered options to junk this. Vbulletin self promotion on the backs of other people's sites. No doubt I will have to go squirreling around the templates to shift it. Time for Vb to get smart and come into line here. But me thinks they are up the creek in the wrong direction and attempting to play catch up!

All the stuff in 3.7.3 is still lacking compared to other boards under GPL (Fireboard/Community Builder). Likely, I will be looking for other solutions come next licence renewal!

[Lizard King]

So, how to ask google to recrawl and update the links?
You can choose which format you want to use within Google Webmasters account.

[Mazinger]

Ok, dealt with that. Asked google to remove my website then asked to index it again. :)

[MRGTB]

MR GTB, I note you promote vbseo (and indirectly, the ludicrous price of this software),

What gave you the idea I promote vBSEO? Sorry, but your totally wrong! I have nothing against the creators etc. But I do think it's a very over-priced product, and the fact they also charge you an annual re-newel fee on top of that price is a complete rip-off. As far as I'm comcerned, it's yet another case of a third party product cashing in on vBulletin lack of offical add-ons (or default features).

And to go one step further, I'm really glad IPB3 will come with SEO Tools built in as standard. Because it "SHOULD" force vBulletin to have to also include SEO Tools in vB4 by default also (meaning we won't need vBSEO anymore). If they don't, it means people will still have to buy both vB4 and vBSEO to get the same as what IPB3 is going to be offering (but for a lot more money in vB's case). Because you would still have to buy both products. Which would work-out a lot more expensive than just buying IPB3 that comes with them built-in. I seriously hope that's been thought about by vB when creating vB4!

And I don't want to hear the lame excuse of vB not stepping on vBSEO toes either. As there is a product out there called "IPB SEO" for sale, but it's not stopping IPB from adding seo tools by default in IPB3.


but I also note that both your signature sites are not even RANKED by Google... go away, LOL!

Hold on, for starters my mrGTB site only has about 4 posts on it, what do you expect? A PR2. If only LOL.

The other Aquarium Fish site, well that's been online about 2 months now, but quite a lot of changes have been made like having the HTML files in a folder at first, then moving them into the root directory later. So links that where indexed have been broken. So again, give that site time to get all it's pages indexed, and start to get a better PR as a result.

My names not Jesus you know, I'm not a miracle worker.