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It’s that time again - or it least it was that time again yesterday - for an update on vBSEO for GamingVidz.com. I’m a day late because I forgot to write it. I think that’s because Monday was a holiday. Anyway, what makes doing these weekly updates difficult is that I can’t write the update until Monday for GamingVidz and Wednesday for HaloBoards because I’m using data from online searches that day and posting them as I get the results. On my other posts, I can write them and simply use Wordpresses timestamp feature to make the posts go live at a time I specify. I don’t think missing one day will have skewed my results too much though. So without further ado, here are this weeks outstanding numbers:

site:gamingvidz.com (Google) up 67,000 to 97,000!

site:gamingvidz.com (Yahoo) down 285 to 18,447

site:gamingvidz.com (MSN) down 7 to 84

 One of the first things you’ll notice by following the site:gamingvidz.com search for Google are the look of the links in the results pages. Every link besides those found in the “vidz” database have been updated to the new search engine friendly static .html links. GamingVidz must be really loved by Google now, as the results more than doubled this week for a site:gamingvidz.com search! Next week I’ll be posting more graphs from Google analytics to show any updates on where the traffic is coming from, but as you can already see, vBSEO is helping out GamingVidz in the SERPS a lot.

Update: A few minutes after writing this post results at Google for a site:gamingvidz.com search shot up 67,000 more results to 97,000! I waited for a few hours to change the post, but it appears to be holding steady at 97,000!

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There are only 5 days left to get one of 5 free 1600 microsoft point cards with the opening promotion on XboxLiveArcade.com. I just purchased all 5 of them and will be ready to announce the winners on June 1st. Anyone that registers and meets the eligibility requirements on the site can win. Here are the following requirements:

1. You must have at least 25 posts and 3 threads to qualify for the free cards that will be randomly given away. (You may not spam to achieve this.)
2. You can only have one account on the site (do not create multiple accounts in an attempt to increase your chances at winning. This can be tracked, so don’t try to circumvent the system).
3. At the end of May I’ll search our member database for those that qualify and the winners will be randomly selected and contacted via the private message system with the key card code for the 1600 Microsoft Points.

So once you reach that 25 posts (3 of which must be threads) you’ll be eligible to win one.

The contest has run for the last few weeks in April and will end on May 31st. At the time of this writing, XboxliveArcade.com has 1,181 posts. It’s safe to say that this forum was successfully launched, although we still need to focus on providing weekly reviews of XBLA games to ensure people keep coming back for our content.

What do you think of my forum contest? Would you have done anything differently? What could have been improved? Write a comment and let me know.

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What makes vBSEO (aff) great is not only their SEO plugin, but also their affiliate program. It’s free to enter the affiliate program and you don’t even have to own a vBSEO license to join. You make 15% of each sale (15% of $149 for $22.35 per license) sold directly through your link and can also make 2nd tier earnings from other webmasters that sign up through your link. So not only do you have the chance of getting $22.35 for selling a license, but you can also make an additional 5% when other webmasters sell a vBSEO license after signing up through you. Obviously you don’t take the 5% from their revenue, rather vBSEO gives you 2nd tier 5% bonus (5% of $22.35 for $1.11). Now $1.11 is not a lot; however, over time if you sign up multiple people it can be a significant passive revenue stream.

Anyway, after only 36 visitors, I got my first affiliate sale for vBSEO the other day which resulted in $22.35 being deposited into my paypal account. The only problem with the affiliate program though is that I can’t tell where it came from, I’m interested to see if it came through the footer link on my forums or through one of my blog posts. Perhaps I’ll ask on vBSEO’s forum’s to see if there is anyway to track where these sales come from, but I’m pretty sure the only way to do it would be creating multiple affiliate programs (which I’m not sure would comply with their TOS). In any case, someone purchased a vBSEO license through my affiliate link on either this site or one of my two forums that are currently running vBSEO and I got $22.35 for it.

I truly believe that this plugin will help improve the traffic on my forums and I’m out to provide facts to support it. And before you ask, I’m not a mouth piece for vBSEO, rather it’s just one of many tools designed to help improve traffic for forums and a tool that - if proven successful - will help make me more money which I can in turn spend on improving my existing sites, add new features or using elsewhere. I hope that my case studies on vBSEO will help you make a decision on wether or not to purchase a license or two, and if they do would you be so kind as to purchase a license through my affiliate link?

Thanks in advance

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It’s time for the first week’s results from the vBSEO case study on HaloBoards.com and here are the numbers:

site:haloboards.com (Google) up 684 to 6,860

site:haloboards.com (Yahoo) up 96 to 10,605

site:haloboards.com (MSN) up 4 to 122

The first week in the study showed all three search engines getting positive numbers with Google coming up with the largest gain at an extra 684 results found on a site:haloboards.com search. I expect to see Google to move past Yahoo in the coming weeks, but for now Yahoo still holds the crown for the most results found. MSN (or Window’s Live) moved up only 4 results, but as I’ve seen in the other vBSEO case study on GamingVidz.com they still haven’t gotten out of the triple digits, so I don’t expect to see a lot happening with MSN if at all.

vBSEO is a plugin for vBulletin forums that dramatically helps to improve search engine indexing and ranking for a wide variety of keywords on your site, which will in turn improve traffic to your website which will ultimately help you get more members and more revenue from your forum.

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Wow, I can’t believe it’s been six weeks since I’ve installed vBSEO on GamingVidz.com. Well, here are the numbers for this week’s search engine results:

site:gamingvidz.com (Google) up 200 to 30,000

site:gamingvidz.com (Yahoo) down 74 to 18,732

site:gamingvidz.com (MSN) up 22 to 91

As you can see, this week’s results were pretty bland with hardly any movement. I’m still trying to get over the 7,596 jump in Yahoo’s numbers from last week’s update. Perhaps next week there will be some more movement.

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I heard great things about text-link-ads from a wide variety of blogs so I thought I’d give it a try on my largest site, GamingVidz.com. I created an account, applied to display text-link-ads on GV and was automatically denied. Now because GV is a large site with over 220,000 posts and well over 500,000 page views a month, I decided to call them up and see why I was denied. Drew from TLA reviewed my submission and said I was at first denied because GV did not have a high enough link popularity score; however, he then followed by saying that the site was close enough that he would just manually override it for me!

After he manually put me in the program I moved onto the steps of inputting the code on my site. After reaching the stage to find out which code to use I saw that there was no option for vBulletin 3.6x forums, so I called Drew up again and after speaking for a few minutes he told me to just download a backup of my database and to try the vBulletin 3.5x code. It only took me about five minutes to put it all in and it worked out just fine. As you can see, what was intially a denial turned into another publisher I’m now displaying on my site that I wouldn’t have been able to unless I called them up. Kontera was the first publisher I got into via contacting them on phone after being initially denied (you can read about it here). I like tla, because the ads are just that - text links. It’s always nice to have ads on a site that aren’t too intrusive.

The moral of the story? Never give up on a publisher program, affiliate program or any application you’re at first denied for because there’s always a chance you can still get in. I think the tendancy is for people to give up after being denied, but if you follow up with a phone call or email you might get in after all. Good luck out there.

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If you look back to my first post about vBSEO - Case study: vBSEO on GamingVidz.com - you’ll see that I bought two vBSEO licenses. Well, I finally got around to installing vBSEO on my second largest site, HaloBoards.com and here are the initial results from the site:haloboards.com search. I didn’t intentionally delay installing vBSEO, I was just really busy, but what’s nice about that is I have several more weeks of Google Analytics data to show pre-vbseo. Here is a graph of a month’s worth of data showing my visits by source from April 12th, 2007 to May 12th, 2007:

As you can see from the graph above, I received a majority of my traffic directly (forum members typing in the address to come back to the site). Google gave a suprising 7% of my traffic with MSN putting in about 2%. I also got nearly 6% of my traffic from my personal Halo blog - thehalogod.com (where I share my halo videos, thoughts on the halo franchise and various other video games). As you can also see, I received some traffic from halo3forum (I attribute it’s appearence in the graph due to a few big name Halo montage makers hosted videos on H3F with our intro credits in them as well).

Now, onto the site:haloboards.com searches:

site:haloboards.com (Google) 6,176

site:haloboards.com (Yahoo) 10,509

site:haloboards.com (MSN) 118

Now that I am running two case studies about vBSEO at the same time, I plan to update the GamingVidz study on Monday’s (as usual) but will be doing an update on HaloBoards every Wednesday. Also, just like my study on GamingVidz, I plan to do monthly graphs from Google Analytics to display where the traffic for my site’s comes from. The goal here is to see an increase in the share from search engines.

I believe it’s already working for GamingVidz and the longer it’s been installed for, the more traffic I’ll be able to get from search engines and subsequently more members on the site.

If these posts have helped you decide to purchase vBSEO why not do so through my affiliate link? Thanks in advance.

vBSEO.com (aff)

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