Simple vbulletin SEO tips: The Title Tag

We covered SEO titles for Wordpress in the last entry - now let’s optimise the titles for popular forum software platform vbulletin a little better.

As before, we want our site name to actually be the forum index page name. That means moving away from the generic titles to something a little more specific.

There are a couple of steps to this:

1. Remove “- Powered by vbulletin”

We don’t really want our forum title to look like this: “My Forum Name - Powered by vbulletin”

To remove the “powered by” from the titles:

In the vbulletin admin panel:

Languages & Phrases -> Phrase Manager -> x_powered_by_vbulletin (it’s on page 31) -> [delete contents]

2. Remove site name from board titles

I don’t like to see the different boards on the forum carrying the forum name - ie, “My Board Name - My Forum Name”.

Wouldn’t a shorter snappier title be better for search engines and human users?

In your templates section: Forum Display Templates >> FORUMDISPLAY:

Remove the following from within the title tag:

- $vboptions[bbtitle]

3. Remove site name from thread titles

Again, vbulletin shows your forum name in your thread titles, ie - “This is a Thread - My Forum Name”.

And again, I want it to just show as: “This is my Thread”.

Why? Because the thread name is it’s own keyword title.

To remove - go to the following template:

Show Thread Templates >> SHOWTHREAD

Remove the following:

- $vboptions[bbtitle]

4. Rename your site

In the vb admin panel, go to:

vbulletin options >> Site name / URL / Contact Details >> Edit Settings

Now we’ve removed the last part, let’s create a proper keyword-centered forum name.

Change “Forum Name” so that you can add a bunch of keywords into the forum index title.

For example, most forums use a b0ring domain-centric title: “My Domain Forum - Powered by vbulletin”.

Wouldn’t it look better as: “Keyword Widget & Widgetiser Forums”

You just told human users exactly what you’re about - you also just gave the search engines a couple of keywords to associate with your forums.

TIP: Add this same keyword name to your “Homepage Name” box just a few fields below the “Forum name”. Now you just pointed keyword anchor text to your homepage via internal links from every page on your forums.

Better, huh? :)

Overall

As before, this is simple Whitehat SEO - we want our index page to give a proper description of what our site is about, in order to entice human users, and add keywords for search engines.

In other words, we’re trying to re-code the page titles across the forum to look how they would if we’d actually built a static site, not dynamic one.

In doing so, we disable where the site name appears in the other pages, so that they can remain focused on their own unique page titles.

It also makes the titles shorter, which in my opinion makes your keyword titles stand out better for human-user clickthroughs.

Do shorter titles help with ranking on any search engine?

Well, let’s put it this way - I can’t think of any justification for placing your forum name in every single page of your forum, other than for branding purposes.

However, as most forums have no real brand, plus the fact that most forum titles are going to get cut off in the search results anyway, they are seriously begging to be treated as redundant.

ADDED: Once you’ve had fun with that, here are a couple more posts I’ve written covering SEO issues for vbulletin:

vbulletin SEO
SEO for vbulletin - simple how to and tips