Free vBulletin SEO Guide

Introduction:
This article should help educate any webmaster in learning ways to enhance their site search engine optimization. This article is a constant work in progress, as Google constantly updates their ranking methods.

if you're looking to drive traffic to your site in a cost effective way, optimizing your site for search engines can be a great way to go about it. Search Engine Optimization on your site, is the best long term, and consistant method to drive traffic to your site thats highly targeted! Even with the influx of social media sites like youtube, facebook, twitter, these will eventually fade away for new sites and all that hard work will be lost. A good example would be all the people who used to use MySpace for their marketing, and the tremendous losses they took.

FREE Modifications:
One of the first things to do, is take advantage of all the free resources available.

1. Canonical URL's - SEOvB - Link Canonicalization for vBulletin Stop Duplicate Content NOW! - vBulletin.org Forum

2. Sitemap generator - vBSEO Google/Yahoo Sitemap Generator - vBulletin.org Forum

3. Upload and use robots.txt (see post two in this thread) http://www.adminaddict.net/forum/search-engine-optimization/whats-your-robots-txt-2019/

These modifications will achieve almost a complete elimination of duplicate content for your site. The sitemap generator will only make recommendations of URL's for Google to crawl, and does not guarantee that your site will get indexed, or URL's crawled for sure no matter what anyone might want you to think.

Learning How To Link:
Google is going to probably be your main target as they get the majority of search queries every month. You'll want to target keywords that get a lot of traffic. The Google Keyword Tracker Tool, provides a great place to see how many times a month given key phrases are searched for.

Once you've got your keywords/key phrases picked out, the next thing to do is start to optimize your links to target these words. For the scope of this article we're just discussing link building, but there are also methods and enhancements you can do to optimize your pages for keywords.

Think of back links, as a vote of confidence from one site to the next. This is also why its very important to monitor what out going links are on your site.

The link consists of two major parts. The first is the link itself, and the second is the anchor text. The anchor text is what appears to search engines and humans, and should describe briefly as possible what the page is about. Generally, the anchor text, is going to match your keyword or keyphrase.

For example, my personal site, when I link to it, I simply use my name like so David McHenry. This is because I want my site to appear in the top of Google for search results when someone Google's my name. It wouldn't make much sense to link to that site, and use an anchor text of something other than my name Ex: .[ame="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=david+mchenry&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g2"]David McHenry[/ame] (direct link to search results as an example).

When you use bbCode to make your signature links the correct format will be

PHP:

[URL="http://example.com"]Example[/URL]


When you use HTML code, the correct format is: (note you can also use a title attribute as in the second example)

HTML:

<a href="http://example.com">Example</a>

Using the title attribute

HTML:

<a href="http://example.com" title="This page is about Example">Example</a>

So when you're going out and creating links to your forum (signature links are a great source for these), remember to properly link to your forum using anchor text that targets your forum/site. Watch for upcoming posts about deep linking, and how to interlink sites, and to specific pages on your site.

Never link to the same page using different anchor text from the same page! Google will only follow the first link to that page

Quick Template Edit:

This list could get really long with things you could hide from search engine bots, the only one we'll discuss right now due to my lack of time is adding heading tags to your pages.

Making use of <h2> through <h6> tags on your page will build a solid page structure and inform the spiders of the most important content sections, followed by sections which may not be so important. When a crawler comes across content in the <h2> tags it naturally thinks to itself, that whatever is between those tags, the page should generally be about. Coincidentally when you have a properly written page title for search engine optimization, the h2 tags will also contain many of the same keywords.

To edit the templates (You'll only need to do this for your default skin). vBulletin AdminCP -> Style Manager -> Edit Templates

On your showthread template, after $navbar place the following code:

HTML:

<div style=”text-align:center”>
<h2 class=”david″>$thread[title_clean]</h2>
<h3 class=”david″>Discuss $thread[title_clean] at $foruminfo[title_clean]</h3>
</div>

For your forumdisplay template place the following code after $navbar:

HTML:

<div style=”text-align:center;”>
<h2 class=”david″>$foruminfo[title_clean]</h2>
<h3 class=”david″>$foruminfo[description]</h3>
</div>

The final step, is so you can apply styling to the tags, to better match your page style, and hopefully not take as much space up, in your additional CSS definitions place:

HTML:

h2.david {font-family: Arial; font-size: 20px; color: #000000; font-weight: bold;}
h3.david {font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; color: #000000; font-weight: bold;}

By doing this, you’re placing your forum keywords on the page along with the description, and for the showthread pages it should place the thread title and forum above the fold and in a easy location so the cralwers know what the page is about.

Other items that can help increase your rankings

Spiders can be funny creators when crawling your site. One thing they love is content, and one thing they hate is code! So you'll want to remove as much code from the page as possible while leaving the maximum amount of relevant content.

Some things in vBulletin you can do to reduce the code are:

• Store your CSS style sheets in the file system. Reduce your page load times, and the amount of code spiders see before hitting your actual content.
• Ensure that you’re vBulletin settings for messaging and editing options to automatically quote the post title are enabled
• Remove the powered by vBulletin from the title

Useful Links:

• Google Webmaster Tools recommended
• AdminAddict
• SEOMoz Blog

This post has been promoted to an article

 

Reserved for updates

 

Here are a few great articles on getting the most out of vBulletin that our members have enjoyed.

http://www.adminaddict.net/forum/ba...h-engine-optimization-optimization-tips-4307/
http://www.adminaddict.net/forum/ba...ization-vbulletin-without-vbulletin-seo-4309/
http://www.adminaddict.net/forum/backend-technical/vbulletin-seo-optimization-tips-4312/
Ofcourse, I would suggest adding vBSEO for the last [HOW TO]

 

I've moved this to the Articles section.

 

Posting them here for our members to enjoy would probably be helpful if your intent is to add to this thread.

 

missing " ] " in html tag.

 

well we can copy and past all 3 here if you wish, just thought it would clutter up the thread

 

Separate threads would probably be best. We can inter-link them though.

I don't mind if you add a linkback to your site if you post the articles here, and include a byline at the bottom.

 

alright, sounds good
I'll post them and edit my first reply

 

Such nice tutorial and mostly tricks are pretty new for me. We know about the importance of vBulletin software in SEO.