vBulletin 4 SEO Tips

vBulletin 4 SEO Tips to rank your vBulletin powered sites better especially focusing on Why search engines cannot find your vBulletin 4 site?

This guest post is by Sadik of Oracle Forum.

SEO is a term which is thrown around a lot. Most new site owners are spending considerable time and effort into optimizing their sites for search engines and specifically for Google. Some unlucky souls also end up hiring one of the hundreds of scam SEO experts shelling out several hundred dollars. I am going to talk about Search Engine Optimization in general in this three part series and vBulletin 4 in particular.

Why vBulletin 4?

I own and administer several vBulletin forums. I could also talk about WordPress or Joomla but vBulletin 4 is a good case in point. Good case in point because, although being the forum system which powers most of internet communities, the vBulletin 4 series is a SEO nightmare. The fault is not really within the vBulletin application framework, but the lack of Search Engines consideration in the view (frontend) layer, meaning, the templates.

vBulletin 4 Suite consists of the forums, the CMS and the Blogs. Before we delve into the technical details of search engine optimization for VB4, let us take a moment and understand the nature of SEO itself.

What is SEO?

I am not going to present you any rocket science here. Search Engine optimization, quite simply, means ensuring that,

1. Search Engines find your site’s pages
2. Search Engine can make out from your HTML output, what the page is about, and what the content is.

Let us look at Point 1.

Why can’t search engines find my site?

Search Engines follow real life methodology of making someone famous. If I was to be known, someone needs to mention me. The more famous a person who mentions me, the more famous I will get. So my chances at fame are much higher if Angelina and Brad Pitt were to mention me, compared to Jane and Joe (whoever they are).

So Search Engines will find you, quite simply, if people link you. SE will give you more importance if well established, highly ranked sites such as New York Times or BBC were to link you compared to smaller sites. But each reference counts and the more the better. This point is entirely about Off-Site SEO. We are however going to talk more about On-Site / On-Page SEO.

Beginners will obviously find it difficult getting other people to link them. So it helps if you are a multi-site owner. You can link your new site from your established site(s). Also adequate care should be taken to have good inter-linking of pages on your site itself.

Now Let us turn our attention to Point 2, the main subject of these posts.

vBulletin 4 and On-Page SEO

Assume that you are writing a simple program to automatically read a web page. What will you need to do?

Two things,

1. Find out what the page is about, that is, topic of the page.
2. Find content within the HTML code written on the Topic.

That is what every search engine aims to do, no matter how complex the search engine algorithm. Since we have taken the example of vBulletin 4, let us get into a little specific detail about the two points above with respect to vBulletin 4. I am specifically talking about,

1. Optimizing the title of the article / thread / Blog for search engines to know for sure the topic.
2. Ensuring as semantic HTML output as possible remaining within the boundaries of vBulletin. Like replacing LI elements with DIV, and removing fluff, which is useless bloat which comes with vBulletin, like Forum Jump, post icons, permissions on showthread / forumdisplay pages
3. Presenting the cream content of the article / thread / blog to the search engine in an easily identifiable manner instead of it being buried deep into a crapload of html like hover menus, navbar etc.
4. The Extras, measuring and increasing the forum speed through pagespeed, proper interlinking etc.

In my second post, I am going to talk about all the points above and some more with respect to vBulletin 4 specifically mentioning how you can perform the optimizations on your own vBulletin powered sites.

So stay tuned…

This guest post is by Sadik of Oracle Forum.

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