I launched northwestfirearms.com back in August of 2008 for the purpose of organizing gun owners in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. Over the years we've seen our traffic and rankings fluctuate quite a bit, though I really didn't do much SEO-wise. We started with vB 3, upgraded to vB 4 with VBSEO, and last month made the jump to XenForo (thanks for the inspiration @digitalpoint). Now that the migration is complete, I'd like to do what I can to increase our rankings. There is so much SEO information out there and so many people who say they know exactly what to do, it really is overwhelming. I'm concerned I might try something, only to find out it's a blackhat technique and get dinged by Google. With over a million posts we certainly don't lack content, but our visits are down a bit from where they once were. Here's a screen shot of our analytics. If you were I, where would you start? Is there a trusted, proven, American company I could hire to do this for me?
PM me with your site and your target keywords. I'll give you a no BS evaluation of what your situation is. And I "know exactly what to do". No, but really, I do.
Unfortunately, SEO can be pretty tricky with forums. While you can create your own metadata by category or general subject matter, most, if not all of the content on your site will be created by forum members and may or may not be good for SEO. One thing I would suggest is to make sure each page has its own metadata; many forums have default meta descriptions and keywords that are applied across the board. Make sure this is disabled and each page is assigned its own metadata. Another thing I would suggest is insuring that every post has tags. Encourage posters to use them and if you find posts that do not have tags, add them yourself.
xenforo out of the box has killer seo. Microdata across breadcrumbs and it took me about an hour to deal with google authorship for everyone as well. Its pretty awesome stuff really. Xen doesn't have the typical seo quandaries that are related to forums, fortunately. I can look this over shortly and drop some suggestions. This should be fairly straight forward. Nigel
Thanks for the reply guys. Regarding keywords, it's really sad the largest firearm site in the Northwest doesn't come up when you search for oregon guns/firearms, washington guns/firearms, idaho guns/firearms, etc. I should make a list, huh?
Well, a list of what you think you should rank for is sorta helpful but a quick glance shows largely no traffic for those terms when tied to the location. So those search terms are entirely useless to try to rank. That also sorta fails to take into consideration anything new landscape wise from the last 5 months or so. Such as, implicit and explicit queries. Google already knows where people are for instance so folks lately tend to get geographically centric results under the huge returns... like wikipedia for instance. Nigel
Ah that makes a lot of sense. So how would one target a specific geographic location via SEO, taking into consideration Google knows where those people are?
That requires a bit of research but basically you can remove some demographic stuff and go big here. Still not a ton of traffic but you will likely want to be here for instance https://www.google.com/search?q=fireams forum&oq=fireams forum&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.2615j0j7&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=122&ie=UTF-8#nfpr=1&q=firearms forum&spell=1 Your site is pretty active. This should not be too entirely vexing. It should rank for a wide range of things. Keep in mind porting things to a new system will still cause a few disruptions as well but it should come around fairly fast. I would probably start with a new title attribute. Took me sec to not call that from xenforo and write my own in there. I will try to flesh this out in a sec for you. Nigel
Absolutely!... and you don't have to look far to find one! You mentioned you didn't do much SEO-wise... What, if any, SEO have you or anyone else done to the site after all the upgrades? Holla!
Thanks for the replies guys. @GuruCreation we literally haven't done anything except install a XenForo sitemap...