Just purchased vBulletin - need advice

Hi,

I am on the way to start a forum and have just uploaded the vBulletin files.

I want to make it right from the beginning.

First I am interested in the on-page SEO and I have heard that vBSEO is good:
http://www.vbseo.com/purchase/

However $149 seem a little bit much for some mod_rewrite. Any other solution to get it cheaper?

And some recommended plugins?

Other advice?

Thanks.

 

Personally, I think that vbulletin is fine as it is - it's designed very well in terms of readability for search engines. But there are a couple of things I'd modify in it to help your rankings. You want to minimize the "extraneous text" in the title tags, and the default settings have a lot of it. 1st, get rid of the "powered by vbulletin" stuff:

Languages & Phrases -> Search in Phrases

Change this phrase:

x_powered_by_vbulletin

From this:

{1} - powered by vBulletin

To this:

{1}

2nd, you probably will want to take off the "X Forums" that it shows in the title tags for each thread. More words means less weight for each individual word by the search engines, and less chance for you ranking. For this:

Under Styles and templates, click Style Manager, then select edit templates in the upper right from the drop-down menu. Double click on "Show Thread Templates >>", and then click on SHOW THREAD and edit it. At the top of the code you should see:

<title>$thread[title]<if condition="$pagenumber>1"> - <phrase 1="$pagenumber">$vbphrase[page_x]</phrase></if> - $vboptions[bbtitle]</title>

Take out the "- $vboptions[bbtitle]" part so that the line is now:

<title>$thread[title]<if condition="$pagenumber>1"> - <phrase 1="$pagenumber">$vbphrase[page_x]</phrase></if></title>

(Thanks to Shawn here at DP for helping me figure that one out).

The other thing I would suggest doing if you think you might ever open another forum again is keeping a little text file with all the changes you make and how to do them. That's where I got all this stuff from - it makes it much easier to have it right there for if you need to do it again, and there is a lot of stuff you may want to change to get your forums the way you want.

 

Please see this post.

 

There are several SEO-related plugins at vbulletin.org. You can find them and experiment with them and it is a great way of learning about SEO, learning about how things work in vbulletin, and it will probably inspire you to do some of your own things.

vbseo, though, is a nice package. It does a lot more than just rewriting URL's and if you calculate the cost of your time in figuring everything out, making decisions, testing plugins, etc. it doesn't cost that much. I personally think it is worth it.

You don't need vbseo to rank well. All it does is help out on your on-page SEO strategy. There are caveats - a footer link, lack of visibility to the source code, and either figuring out how to run Zend or ionCube in cooperation with eAccellerator or forgetting about eAccellerator altogether.

On page SEO only gets you so far though - and it doesn't get you far at all if it's your only SEO strategy.

The install is easy and the number of features is impressive. If you do make the decision to buy it, remember that you are going to be locked in for the long haul - if you end up wanting to dump it, you'll either have to duplicate the re-writes you have configured, or you will end up with a lot of 404's.

It's really up to you. There are a number of reasons to like it, and there are several that point to "just save the money".

 

Thank you all three, very appreciated.

I made the changes kneukm03 suggested but I only removed "powered by vBulletin" in the title, not the other places. I did not buy the license to remove it fully and to do that would be almost criminal.

I think I will wait a little with the vbseo until I have checked it out more. I notice that DP for example does not use mod_rewrite but still ranks very well in the SERPs ... I will see later.

 

I see you've already made your decision regarding vBSEO, and I think you made a good one...vBSEO is a great piece of software, but it is terribly overpriced. The only people that should be spending $150 on it are the people with very developed forums that have plenty of revenue flowing in...Otherwise, your $150 will be much better spent elsewhere.

 

When I see SEO titles like that here at DP, I may consider it.

However, at this time, there are no quantifiable benefits.