vbulletin optimization

[Chris]

I'm working on a vbulletin optimization article.

I plan on covering seo for vbulletin, tips and tricks to encourage users to register, and ways to get your new forum off the ground.

Can anyone think of something else I should cover?

[James]

I suggest you split it into sections and have a series of articles starting with reasons to make a forum, then a forum software comparison, and moving into what you have above.

[Chris]

Nah. I don't have the time or experience to do a forum comparison, because I use vbulletin exclusively and so would have to make a forum just to adequately review the other software.

As for reasons for making a forum, Mark already write a nice article on that.

I want this article to be the steps you need to take after installing vbulletin.

[Sean]

I don't have much experience with forums but a few things come to mind:

1. Forum-specific design like skinning or template editing or whatever.
2. Advantages and disadvantages to different forum addons like rep points, forum store, arcade.
3. Advice for administrating forums like should the admin just moderate or participate in the topics, how should mods be picked, how should the members be moderated, etc... and the advatages/disadvantages to doing these things certain ways.

These are just off the top of my head so they aren't that great.

[Cutter]

There is a plugin I just downloaded from vbulletin.org last night:
http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=99579

It modifies welcome headers. Asks for sign-ups by unregistered users on every page. Once they sign up, asks them to posts. If someone hasn't posted in a few weeks, asks them to post, etc.

I also saw an old mod that redirected to sign up page if an unregistered user tried to post. It was an old version so I don't know if it works, but I'm going to try to find something that does.

[Chris]

Ya Cutter, I got that.. though I did it based on the adminzone article about it rather than the hack (which seems to have just been released on the 29th of Oct). But I think I'll mention it as the hack instead, so I'm not linking to a competing site.

[piniyini]

I thought vb was optimized out of the box, will be interesting to hear what you say in your article

[Cutter]

Definately not optimized. I do believe that the did fix the google user id problem which you no longer have to do yourself. That might be what you were thinking of.

[MarkB]

Chris, tips on best way to have the title displayed (thread name before site name? etc), paying attention to names of individual forums for higher keyword relevance, etc etc. I'm looking forward to reading it.

[Westech]

I'm a checklist junkie. I loved your quick SEO checklist article and still refer back to it when building a new site to make sure I didn't overlook something.

I'd like to see a concise checklist included for recommended steps to optimize a default installation of vB. This could include both SEO optimization and interface optimization to lure visitors in to register and participate.

[deronsizemore]

Nice! I'm hopefully going to start a forum soon. Can't wait to hear what you got to say.

[Chris]

well its up

[Cutter]

Just finished reading it. Very good! I just added the robots.txt file stuff to my site. I'm also about to add the latest threads plug-in. There is another plug-in called vBExternal that does similar things, but you can also publish a newest member list and the like.

I spent some money on vbSEO ( http://www.vbseo.com/ ) a few weeks ago. I can't honestly say whether or not its helped me out in the search engines (too early too tell), but it does make all the URLs SE friendly, and fixes the archive. It also makes reading the site stats a lot easier. Since its premium software I don't have to worry about updates (it seems to me that they are bringing in enough sales to stick around for a while.)

Edit -- There are reports of SE traffic dropping off after implementing vbSEO, so I would be careful.