vBulletin Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

If you have to ask why its important to do search engine optimization on your vBulletin forum, then you should read the Why Worry About SEO article before reading this one. I also recommend you read Basic SEO;

A short answer as to why its important is simple. Good SEO will help you rank higher in the search engines. Why is that important? Well, the higher you rank in the search engines, the more people who will find your forum while they're searching the web, and thus the more new members you will get. The more members you get, the bigger and stronger your forum community will grow. After all, most of us want our forums to grow and our communities to be busy.

This article discusses some things you should consider doing with your vBulletin forum to help you rank higher in the search engine rankings.

Also, the Code suggestions made here are for vBulletin version 3.5x.

For starters, I have made numerous posts in the foums regarding this subject. Most of them you can find in our How to SEO your vBulletin forum where our members post questions and suggestions about how to improve your vBulletin for Search Engine Optimization.

Here is a short list:

How to Remove - "Powered by vBulletin" in your Title Tag -This is important modification to make because Google and other search engines look closely at the title tag of a page (among other factors) to determine what the page is about. When your site is about, Model Trains for example, the "Powered by vBulletin" part of the title tag can confuse the search engines a little and leaves them wondering what the page is about because your page has 2 different topics in the title tag.

Add HTML Pages to your Forum for Enhanced SEO - This is a great way to get highly keyword targetted pages on your site and helps clarify to search engines exactly what specific pages and forums are about. This site is a good example of this in action. You will notice that most of the articles contain references to forums and posts also on this site. You may have found this site via one of these article pages being listed in the search engiens, hence, you can see exactly how it works. These pages should be targeted to your main keyword phrases. So, if you have a site about Search Engines, you would want a page about Google, and one about Yahoo and one about MSN Search, etc. You get the idea.

Adding H1 Tags to your Forum and Threads - Using H1 tags is a great way to put emphasis on a forum's Keywords. This helps search engines such as Google and Yahoo determin what the page content is about, and can be powerful when used in conjunction with strong Title Tags and page descriptions. Using the H1 tag will result in large font on a forum if used alone. This is where CSS comes in handy. By using CSS, we can change the output format of the H1 tag, which results in the font looking normal and blending into a site. We describe how to use the CSS in vBulletin to control the appearance of H1 tags in the post reffered to above. For Example: Using <h1>Important keyword</h1> will return better results on search engines, then “important keyword” without the H1 tags will.

How to link to your vBulletin forum - Linking to your forum Properly using keyword rich Anchor Text can make all the difference in how well your forum is ranked by the search engines.

Duplicate Content and vBulletin - This penalty is applied by Google and possibly other search engines when content found on your website is largely the same as what is found elsewhere on your site or on other websites across the internet. Is vBulletin vunerable to duplicate content penalties from Google and other Search engines?