Ok, it’s time for another update on vBSEO’s progress on GamingVidz.com! I was a day late, but I don’t believe it will impact the results too much in the long run. This week there were some HUGE changes in the numbers, some for the worse others for better.

site:gamingvidz.com (Google) down 3,300 to 29,800

site:gamingvidz.com (Yahoo) up 7,596 to 18,806!

site:gamingvidz.com (MSN) down 9 to 71

So there were obviously a lot more changes this week. I was very suprised to see the 3,300 drop in google’s results (I think I’ll post over at vBSEO’s forums to see what they think of it). On the other hand, I had my best week ever with Yahoo pulling in an astounding 7,596 links on GamingVidz.com! I attribute this to the vBSEO site map plugin I had installed along with vBSEO weeks ago that I did not configure correctly at the time. There are options to notify Yahoo and Google automatically when a new site map is created and I got Google’s turned on fine, but Yahoo’s was not on auto notify until a week ago. I am 99% sure that now the site map plugin is configured correctly, it led to the increases seen this week. MSN again is worthless at only 71 results found on a site:gamingvidz.com search. If you follow the link however, you’ll see that MSN’s search results did update the title to my site. I recently changed the title for GamingVidz.com pages to be “GamingVidz.com: Game. Share. Discuss.” but I still don’t know a solid reason why I’m not gaining results on MSN. I would assume that if it’s pulling down information that has changed on various pages, that it’d also be pulling in new results.

Overall, this has been a solid week with Yahoo’s 7,596 gain.

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I added a contact page to the site using Douglas Karr’s contact form with spam protection. He just released a new version five days ago, so I’m glad that when I finally got around to adding a contact page, I was able to do so just as a new version of the plugin I was already planning to use was relased. The most important feature is the ability to create your own human logic question for people to answer before being allowed to use the contact form. Human logic questions are the best way to stop spam bots these days.

Also, I updated the look of the site a little. As you can see, I added a picture of myself to the upper right portion of the header and I also added a favicon image to the site. I had meant to do this last weekend, but was too busy. I think it works alright, but I may redo it with a picture that makes it near impossible to see my eyes.

What do you think of the favicon? I know the header is simple, I just wanted to be able to provide my readers a picture of what I look like. More stuff is in the works, I plan to begin promoting this blog now as I believe I have useful information for webmasters in general, but in particular forum webmasters. I will be posting every other day at the very least.

Feel free to comment on my posts, I want to know what you think about my thoughts and ideas.

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It’s been exactly one month since installing vBSEO on GamingVidz.com and I haven’t seen a lot of changes in my site:gamingvidz.com searches as you can see below:

site:gamingvidz.com (Google) up 400 to 33,100

site:gamingvidz.com (Yahoo) up 108 to 11,210

site:gamingvidz.com (MSN) down 19 to 80

I did talk with some people on the vBSEO forums and they told me that the site:gamingvidz.com search is not that reliable. Many then directed me towards the more important figures to look at should be where my traffic comes from via Google analytics. Luckily I already had analytics running on the site before I installed vBSEO so I can show you an image from before vBSEO was installed and after it was installed. The figures are promising:

Pre vBSEO (April 2nd to April 9th - I don’t have any earlier data)

Over 90 percent of the traffic was from direct type in (i.e. Returning forum members typing in the address again)

After vBSEO (April 10th to May 7th - 4 weeks after the vBSEO installation)

Now after 4 weeks since the installation of vBSEO you can see the traffic from direct type in is only about 86 percent and I’ve received more traffic from other sources i.e. the slice for Google is larger. There was a fair amount of traffic from vBadvanced.com, but I believe that’s simply because I was posting a lot and members were coming to check out the site.

In any case I do believe that the vBSEO plugin is working because the direct traffic has dropped down and more traffic is coming from the sources; however, I will do another in depth analysis in another four weeks to see if there are even more improvements.

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In the first two parts of my “start a forum” series I covered picking a topic, buying a domain name and choosing a forum software. Today I’m going to tell you about choosing a web host.

It’s important to research any host you are looking to go with for a few key features:

MySQL database support
High number of MySQL connections
PHP 4 or 5
Amount of bandwidth provided
Number of websites you can host
Customer service

Wether or not you plan to have more than one forum or website, it’s important to have some breathing room in your hosting plan so that you don’t just have to quickly move onto something else. Research any host you plan to go with using third party sources (i.e. ask questions at webhostingtalk.com). I personally am still hosted under the same plan that I started my first forum on nearly two years ago with hosting from Site5.com (aff). I’ve had an overall great experience working with them and they have fast customer service. I may be moving onto a dedicated hosting solution in the next few months however, as I occasionally get automated messages from my vBulletin forums stating too many people are connected at one time. All shared hosts put a limit on the max number of concurrent connections though and you’ll always be outgrowing your hosting plans eventually. I was even able to have 385 on at one time on GamingVidz.com back in february without a problem. In any case, I still plan to keep my account with Site5.com even after I purchase a dedicated hosting solution, because I intend to use a backup system to dump my MySQL databases to my shared hosting account with site5 just in case my dedicated host loses my data.

Next time I’ll cover initial forum launch strategies to help increase new registrations and tactics to encourage members to post.

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Use FavIcon’s on your websites and forums to improve the overall branding, color coordination and professionalism of your site’s. FavIcon’s are the little image displayed inside the URL bar in your web browser. They are also visible in favorite lists and tabbed windows. Adding a FavIcon catered towards your website or forum is simple. Create an image based off your site’s logo, color scheme or some other image with equal height and width dimensions then upload it at this site to create a FavIcon automatically. After uploading your image you’ll be able to see a preview and/or choose to save the FavIcon to your computer. After you’ve made one you like and saved it to your computer you should be able to open up the folder to view the favicon.ico file inside the folder. Now ftp into your site and upload the favicon.ico file to the root of your website and refresh your browser. You should now see the FavIcon inside the URL bar on the left hand side.

I previously had to use a photoshop plugin to do this, but after finding this site I have since saved a bunch of time. This is a quick way to further improve your website’s branding and professionalism without doing a lot of work. (And yes, I know this site does not have a FavIcon yet, although I will be changing my header image and adding a FavIcon really soon.)

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My designer just finished up the GamingVidz skin and I spent the better half of the morning upgrading vBulletin, vBadvanced and vBadvanced links directory. GV was wayyy behind on the upgrade side of things. It was previously running on vBulletin 3.52 but I’m glad to have finally brought it up to vBulletin 3.65.

Now that the site has been upgraded, I plan to promote the new look in a variety of ways that I will describe in later posts.

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