Illinois Skywarn Forum

[Shawn]

Illinois Skywarn Forum

http://www.ilskywarn.com/

A message forum for Illinois Skywarn Storm Spotters.

Edited January 16, 2016 by Forum²

[Mike]

Shawn, I like the style on that site. I am a fan of reds and blues, so it was an instant seller for me. ;)

 

In your footer, you have two links to Privacy Policies, one of which does not work. You also have two links to your Forum Rules page. I would eliminate the first instances, if it were me.

 

I am also a fan of removing the Powered By vBulletin from the titles. I'm guessing you've seen instructions on how to do this on various sites, but just in case -

 

In your Phrase Manager, search for x_powered_by_vbulletin.

 

The code will look like this -

 

{1} - Powered by vBulletin

 

Edit that to appear as -

 

{1}

 

And whilst cleaning up those titles, I also recommend removing the forum name from them, as well. It requires a quick edit of three templates, MEMBERINFO, FORUMDISPLAY and SHOWTHREAD.

 

Near the top of each template, in the <title> tags, you only need to delete this bit of code -

 

$vboptions[bbtitle]

 

Other than those quick changes, I think you've got a sharp site. Good luck with it!

[AWS]

Store the css in a file. It cuts down on the code to content ratio and makes the site load faster.

 

The skin fits the topic. Make the changes that Mike suggested and you should be good.

 

Your welcome message. Make it more descriptive. Use a few sentences to describe your site and make sure to use the keywords you want to target. Logout and take a look at my guest message to get an idea. Use that intro to target your keywords. Only show it on the index page and the forum home. Showing it on all pages doesn't help rankings.

 

To see the reason why you should remove it from all pages instead of the 2 I mentioned check out your Google site results.

 

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS338&q=site%3Ailskywarn.com%2Fforum&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=

 

Notice the descriptions of your threads. They get the title. They miss the content of the threads. That's not good.

 

Looking at the results again. Disallow search.php, member.php, memberlist.php, online.php, showpost.php and anything else that isn't leading to the threads. There is not enough conetnt to any good on those pages.

 

Take a look at the results to one of my sites:

 

http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS338&=&q=site%3Acomputerhelpforums.net&aq=f&aqi=&oq=

 

Notice the difference? This is what builds the longtail search.

 

Make these few changes and you'll notice an increase in traffic.

[Shawn]

Great ideas! I will be sure to give them a try :D

[Shawn]

How would I go about storing a css in a file? How can I only show the guest message on those pages and not all? There is a mod for vb where I can add meta keywords and descriptions to each board on my forum, should I consider that? Should I make those descriptions the same as they are on my forum?

[Mike]

Storing CSS as files is really easy.

 

The first thing you will need to do is to make your /forum/clientscript/vbulletin_css directory is CHMOD 777

 

Visit your Admin CP, select the vBulletin Options menu, then vBulletin Options

 

Select Style and Language options

 

Set 'Store CSS Stylesheets as Files' to Yes

 

Save your changes and you are finished.

 

Whilst using vBulletin, I would install the Welcome Headers add-on. I would then make up a guest message as an image, hot-mapping words like 'Register' to link them to the registration page. That gets all that repetitive text clear out of the way of the search engines. It's just another option for you to consider.

 

There's certainly nothing wrong with adding meta descriptions to each forum, but I would make each description unique to each forum.

[Shawn]

Okay thank you Mike, you and AWS are doing a good job with helping me in forum SEO :D