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SEO Your Forums
It is best to first make sure your board is SEO'd, even if it's
just basic mod_rewrites for redirects, turn those ugly looking
URL's into informative, content rich page titles. A couple of
free mods for VB can be found here:
vB
URL Rewrite to SEO your forums and vBSEO
Google/Yahoo Sitemap Generator for a great sitemap generator
which will really help deliver your content to search engines.
There is also a paid product available for vBulletin called
VBSEO which many people have reported a great experience with.
It's very comprehensive and has loads of options and the creators
appear to have an excellent knowledge of SEO. It's not cheap
but in the long run it can pay itself off over and over again.
Deliver different ad schemes to your guests
Most forum guests out number registered users by a marginal
amount. This is to your advantage and the base of your targeted
audience. Many believe that targeting ads towards registered
members fall flat because most registered and experienced forum
surfers learn to ignore them.
With this in mind, removing ads for your forum members creates
a more pleasant surfing experience which keeps them coming back
to a cleaner looking forum. There are a couple of considerations
to this though, one is that removing ads from members can reduce
the eCPM and will result in fewer impressions though it will
most likely cause an increase in the CTR. This can be a trade
off depending on the sort of ad compaign you choose to run.
Alternatively, some webmasters choose to serve ads to both
by leaving a minimum campaign of ads for members while boosting
it up for unregistered users.
Look and feel of your ads
Making your ads look a part of your forum is important. Ads
that stand apart from your site design are much easier to tune
out. Ads that share the same background color and font are the
most successful, also matching the border color with the backgroud
color makes it look less like an ad and more like site content.
Ad Placement
Google has some great recommendations for forum ad placements
here Six
AdSense optimization tips for forums
To add Adsense to the second post of each thread see here How
To Show A Banner After The First Post In A Thread
Likewise, you can add your banner code to most templates to
taste. The most common are forumdisplay, showthread, navbar
(will place ad on the top of everypage) and footer.
Adsense Search placement
Utilizing googles Adsense Search is another way to increase
your revenue. Something I've recently implemented is putting
the google search code at the top for guests. Leaving the default
board search feature off for guests will promote the use of
it and reduce server load. Here is the code for VB to put it
at the top of your forum for guests only:
In the navbar template find:
Code:
<!-- / nav buttons bar -->
Add your customized Adsense Search code under: (change 1, 3
to your group ID's for unregistered users and users awaiting
confirmation)
Code:
<if condition="in_array($bbuserinfo['usergroupid'],
array(1, 3))">
<br>
<!-- SiteSearch Google -->
code here
<!-- SiteSearch Google -->
</if>
To add Adsense to your default search dropdown see here Add
Google adsense search to your navbar dropdown
Adsense Terms of service
It is very important to understand and comply with the Terms
of Service provided by Adsense. Failure to comply can and most
likely will result in the termination of your Adsense account.
A quick search for banned by adsense at the time of writing
this article renders 492,000 results which is pretty self explanitory.
Other major advertising companies
With the exception of Fastclick all of the sites below make
no mention of NOT placing ads on forums. However, most require
that their ads are placed above the fold. Contextual advertisers
such as YPN and Adsense explicitly say that their text ads cannot
be combined on the same pages.
Getting accepted into the majors with a forum site
This is not always an easy task, certain advertisers such as
YPN and Adsense rarely deny a site and their TOS is fairly forgiving,
allowing the publisher to place their ads where ever they want.
Getting into one of the other sites listed above is a not nearly
as easy.
One of the reasons for this is that forum sites have a lot
of sporradic impressions that are not easy for the publisher
to track or target, especially on a dynamic site. This is one
of the reasons so many forum sites get denied or get their accounts
terminated.
Setup a static and informative home page
When a publisher views your site, they are looking for static
content related to your site and target audience. Just sending
them a link to your forum will mostly likely result in a generic
letter of denial.
Setting up a portal or a static (html) home page for your site
will do wonders. Try to be as informative as possible while
keeping in context with what your site is all about. Articles
that are listed on the front page can be helpful as well, even
if it's just grabbing a post from somewhere on the site and
publishing it.
Publishing ads on new forums
Before a forum site is able to generate revenue it is best that
it's populated with both users and posts. Placing ads when starting
an unpopulated forum gives the appearance that the site is only
there to make money and can potentially turn users off to the
site.
A new sensation that is becoming quite popular is paying for
posts and registrations to boost a new site. Most of these places
will charge a reasonable amount to register users and create
posts that are relevant to your site. This may be a good avenue
for those who don't want to pour a lot of money into advertising.
With the exception of YPN and Adsense, most publishers require
several thousand unique impressions per month before a site
will be considered.
Cheating the search engines
Trying to trick search engines is probably the worst thing for
a site. Although it may go unnoticed for a little while, eventually
the site will either get caught and thrown into google's sandbox
or have your Adsense account terminated and banned.
Things to consider; cloaking and keyword stuffing will usually
get sniffed out by the search engines which in turn will severely
hurt the site's placement and page rank. Though they are easy
to implement and tempting, it can only serve to harm the site
in the long run. Search engines have become very smart and can
easily detect this.
Doing the right thing
By setting up a well SEO'd, easy to navigate site with interesting
and targeted content, your site will get noticed.
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