How To SEO Vbulletin [TUTORIAL]

How To SEO Vbulletin [TUTORIAL]

Contents
1 - First Steps ? How to rewrite Your Vbulletin URLS
2 - Configure Your Robots.txt file
3 - How to setup your google site map
4 - Template changes within Vbulletin
5 - Generating Traffic to your site
6 ? Write unique articles and advertise them


1 - First Steps ? How to rewrite Your Vbulletin URLS
The first thing you need to do is configure the urls for SEO, The more of your web pages you get in to search engines the more visitors you are likely to receive to your site. By default Vbulletin has urls like http://mysite.com/showthread.php?t=28969 now these urls are not good as search engines doesn?t seem to like pages that include certain symbols such as ? and =. Ideally we want our urls to look like http://mysite.com/this-is-the-title.html Having the title of the page in the actual url helps your site get better SEO results. Now we need to choose an add on to help us re-write these urls.

To be able to re-write urls you need something called MOD-rewrite, Check with your web hosting company if this feature is installed. There are a few different mod_rewrite solutions out there, I would highly recommend using vbseo, I have personally used all three of the below and I have seen the best results by far with vbseo, VBSEO costs $160 but is highly worth it!! some url re-writing addins are:
vbseo - the most powerful and easy to install. Also include ping features - but costs $160.
Zoints SEO - this one is free but has fewer features, and requires some manual set up
Daniweb mod_rewrite - another free one, this requires quite a bit of template editing

2- Configure Your Robots.txt file
Some times search engines will try to index pages we know it will have problems with, How we get around this is to create a file called robots.txt and upload it to the root of our web server, In this file we can tell a search engine what pages not to look at when they are finding pages to index. You can also tell the search engine where your ?Site map? is located which I believe is very important. Below is an example of what should be in your robots.txt file.

Robots.txt example

User-agent: *

Code:

sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
Disallow: /forums/archive/
Disallow: /forums/admincp/
Disallow: /forums/attachments/
Disallow: /forums/calendar.php
Disallow: /forums/clientscript/
Disallow: /forums/cpstyles/
Disallow: /forums/customavatars/
Disallow: /forums/customprofilepics/
Disallow: /forums/faq.php
Disallow: /forums/images/
Disallow: /forums/install/
Disallow: /forums/includes/
Disallow: /forums/login.php
Disallow: /forums/misc.php
Disallow: /forums/member.php
Disallow: /forums/modcp/
Disallow: /forums/memberlist.php
Disallow: /forums/newreply.php
Disallow: /forums/newthread.php
Disallow: /forums/private.php
Disallow: /forums/register.php
Disallow: /forums/sendmessage.php
Disallow: /forums/signaturepics/
Disallow: /forums/sendpm.php
Disallow: /forums/search.php

Note : If your forum is not located in the /forums/ directory then change it accordingly. Also replace the site map url to where your site map is located on your site.

3 - How to setup your google site map
vBSEO has also released a vBulletin Google sitemap that tells Google about all the url?s on the forum - both the old urls and the new rewritten url?s. Installing this addin is a must, this will help google find and index the most important pages on your site, and your site will get indexed much faster than if you didnt have a sitemap. When you install this addin it will notify google automatically about your sitemap every day. You can download the sitemap generator by going to vBSEO Google/Yahoo Sitemap Generator - vBulletin.org Forum

Now we need to configure the sitemap to exclude certain urls, login to the vbulletin admincp and click on ?Vbulletin Options > Vbulletin Options > VBSEO Goole/Yahoo Sitemap generator? and change the following settings.

Include show post pages = no
Include member profile pages = no
Include archive pages = Yes for the first few months, then if you have VBSEO installed 301 / redirect these pages to the main pages.

4 - Template changes within Vbulletin
I recommend making the following template changes to help SEO your site. NOTE : Backup your templates before you edit them so you can restore them if needed. To backup your templates go to your admincp and click on ?Styles and Templates? > ?Download / Upload Styles? select your style then click download and save to your computer.

The aim of modifying your vbulletin templates is to make the text / words / pictures on your page relevant to your thread title, so we are going to add a few things that will repeat the the text of your title. Beware if you repeat the title text to many times search engines might see it as spam and penalise your site. If you follow the below modifications your site will be okay.

First we want to configure the websites title / keywords and description. In your admincp click on ?Vbulletin Options? > ?Vbulletin Options? > ?Site Name / URL / Contact details? Then under ?Forum Name? enter a name which is relevant to your site, also try to make this 3-5 words long. Next select ?General Options? from the drop down box, Enter 5 ?Meta Keys? that are relevant to your site, for example if my site is about computers I would enter ?Computer,PC,computing,laptop? Next Enter a description for your site, try to keep this around 10 words.

Navbar Vbulletin Template Modifications
I have changed the navbar so that the breadcrumb title is highlighted to [b]

Go to Style Manager/Main CSS ? and add to the ?Additional CSS definitions?

Code:

.showthreadh1
{
font-family:verdana, geneva, lucida, ?lucida grande?, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
margin:0;
font-size: 14px;
font-weight: bold; 
display: inline;
}

Then in the navbar template find

Code:

[b]$vboptions[bbtitle][/b]

And replace with

Code:

<h1 class=?showthreadh1?>$navbits[lastelement][/b]



With the root url, make sure this points to the root of your site / instead of /index.php

In the navbar i usually add a picture and configure the alt tags. This has been proven to help seo ranking. You can see an example of this on my site Forums - Powered by vBulletin click on a thread / topic on the site then hover your mouse over the picture in the top left hand corner. Enter the following in to the navbar template

Code:

<img border=?0? src=http://www.onlinepctalk.com/picname.jpg width=?92? height=?92? longdesc=?PC Talk Forums - $thread[title] $foruminfo[title]? alt=?$thread[title] $foruminfo[title]?>

Replace the location of your picture and the size of the frame.

Postbit Vbulletin Template Modifications
In the postbit template add the line
Code:
$thread[title]

This will repeat the title of the thread every time someone posts on this thread, Personally I added this code after the line $post[posttime] but you might want to place it somewhere else as your site might have a different layout. If you want to see an example of this take a look at the page What will happen if i update a worng BIOS to... - Forums

Other Optional Vbulletin Template Modifications
Somewhere on your page, around the middle if possible add the following code

Code:

[b]Welcome to PC Talk - $thread[title][/b]



Replace ?Welcome to PC Talk ? with what ever you want.

It is also a good idea to include the following code in your footer, But make sure you use a different sentence as you did above for the

Code:

Thanks for visiting this site, hope you found $thread[title] useful

Somewhere on every page create a link to every forum category you have created, this will help these pages increase there PR status within search engines. On my site Forums - Powered by vBulletin I have created these links in the left column under the google ads. I would recommend using the same name as the forum for the link as this is more likely to make your pages rank higher in search engines for the key words.

Another good tip for SEO is to remove the ?Powered by Vbulletin? which appears in some titles of pages. Go to your ADMINCP> Language & Phrases> Search in Phrases
In your Phrases Search for: x_powered_by_vbulletin (be sure to choose to search by Phrase Text and Phrase Variable Name)
Edit the phrase. Simply change it from {1} - Powered by vBulletin
to {1}
SO your just deleting - Powered by vBulletin


5 - Generating Traffic to your site
Now you have made the SEO changes to your vbulletin board you need to know how to attract people to your site. In the following guide I will assume you are creating a new site and starting from scratch, Altheo you can use the below technique on existing sites with no problem. I setup two vbulletin sites a few years ago and SEO?d them differently and I saw a big difference between the two sites, I will explain the difference below in each section.

Link equity
In my opinion you need to pay allot of attention to your link equity. If you have allot of pages on your site but very little incoming links your link equity will be spread very thinly over your site and your more important high valued pages will not rank as well in search engines. The crawl rate of your site might also reduce. A good way to make sure your lower value pages in vbulletin dont get indexed is to install a robots.txt file, (Which was explained earlier in this document.

With my two sites I did not setup a robots.txt file or configure the google sitemap to exclude certain pages on site A and this site was also getting a lot of signup?s and threads created daily, I saw with this site it was very slow to index pages in google. On site B there were not many signup?s or threads being created, I also installed a robots.txt file and I excluded certain pages from the google site map such as user profile pages, This meant site B had far less pages than site A but I saw the pages on site B appear in google much faster.

Get your PR up
When ever I setup a new site the first thing I do is try to get the PR up. In my opinion the higher PR your site has the faster it will be index by search engines and also it will rank better.

To get a higher PR you basically need to put as many links as you can on other web pages linking back to your page. Make sure you dont spam other websites as your website could get black listed, instead use the methods below and build links steadily. When linking to your site it is very important to link back properly. You need to pick a keyword and stick to it, For example for this site when I link to the home page I always use the key words ?Computing Tips? so on the other site your link should look like Computing Tips and not Computing Tips and Guides this will help you rank well for the keyword Computing Tips in search engines.

If possible get your link on other pages with PR as this will help you gain more PR. Try to get your link on sites that are relevant to yours, This site is about computing / computers so my link will have more weight if it was on another computing site than a site off topic such as health or sports site. Now there are many ways you can get links to your site for SEO, Here is a list

Directory Submissions ? Submit to directories, Take a look on digital point forums, You can pay 10usd for 1000-2000 manual directory submissions. I think this is the best thing you can do for SEO as all links will require a title which I would put at Computing Tips then your url. If you do use this service make sure you check the e-mail address you supplied as most sites will ask you to verify the submission.

Blog Posting ? Post comments on blogs. This is a good way to get relevant links back to your site, in google, do a search for relevant sites to yours by typing something like ?Computing Blogs? in to google and then find blogs to post on. Make sure you post something relevant to the article or your link is more likely to be deleted or not approved by the moderator.

Forum Posting ? Sign up to forums that are similar to yours and put a link to your site in the footer. With some forums you can add up to 4 links so you can also link to sub pages.

Link Exchanges ? Visit some webmaster forums and look for link exchange partners. I usually do this when my site gets PR as you can request link partners websites to also have similar PR. I usually look for site wide exchanges, If you want to exchange site wide links check how many pages there site has in a search engine, to do this go to a search engine and type in site:THEURL Leimholzbau, Theurl, Leimholz, Fichte, Kiefer, Tanne, Keilzinkware, Leisten, Holzwerkstoff, Holz, MDF so for this site it will be site:Computing Tips and Guides the more links in search engines they have the better for your site. Visit digital point forums if you want to look for SEO link exchanges.

Social Networking Sites ? I personally haven?t have much luck with them but some people have, submit your site to Digg - All News, Videos, & Images and you might get lucky ;-) There are also lots of other social networking sites, search google for them.

6 ? Write unique articles and advertise them

The best way to drive traffic to your site is to write articles and advertise them properly. Never copy articles from another site, Search engines will pick up on this (Duplicate content) and could possibly penalise you. I will now show you how to write articles and SEO them.

First decide what you want to write about, I will use this article I wrote as an example. Then decide what phrase / title you want to give it. I gave this article the title of ?How to seo vbulletin? When you have decided what title you want to use do a search for it in google, if google returns over 1,000,000 results then it could be quite hard to reach high rankings, but anything under should be achievable. We should be able to get you ranked in the top 10 for your article.

Create a new thread and give it the title you want to target. Now try to write an article 2000 with words, In the first 2 or 3 paragraphs try to use the words from the title as much as possible, But dont make it look spammy. Then in the rest of the document try to use the words from the title in every other paragraph. This will help boost the ?Key words? relevancy to the page and will help your SEO. Use Microsoft word / front page to check your spelling as some search engines will pick up on spelling mistakes. Try to make your article as interesting as possible, If people like your article they are more likely to link to it from other sites.

Once the article has been published we need to advertise it by posting links on other sites. When linking back to the article remember to use the title as the link name for example the link to this article would be How to SEO Vbulletin and not Computing Tips and Guides this is very important. Below is how I would link to this article on other sites.

Blog Posting ? This is by far my best method of getting quality in-coming links. Do a search in google for your phrase / title ?How to SEO Vbulletin? and look for blogs , Some blogs will have pages with PR which will also help your article get PR. On blogs you can enter you name as the phrase / title of the article then under url enter the url of the article. Then make sure you enter a quality comment as a spammy one might get deleted. Your comment will then be posted like this

Comment Example:
Posted by How to SEO Vbulletin
Thanks for this article, I have now successfully SEO?d my vbulletin forum.

Forum Posting ? This is also a very good way to get 100?s of pages to link to your article, Simply put the link in your signature. Remember that most vbulletin forums let you have 4 urls, so what I do is link to 4 articles I have written.

Submit Article To Social Networking Sites ? Again ive not had much success with this and can not really recommend this.

Link Exchanges ? Not really worth the time and hassle, But will help, Search digital point forums for relevant link exchanges to your article.

If you follow the above steps I dont see any reason why your article can not rank in the top 10 in search engines.