This page will contain some of the greatest vBulletin tips on the web, and actually you might not be able to find them elsewhere on the web. Why? Most of them we learned ourselves through the 7+ years of using vBulletin software.
Keep checking back here and our Facebook page for more vBulletin tip updates.
The best vBulletin tips for forum and vBulletin owners
1. Make sure your meta description for your vBulletin forum is user friendly and not just keyword stuffed. A/B test your meta tags, you’ll notice increased clickthrough from google search using targeted meta descriptions on your important pages.
2. Are you maximizing the potential of your vBulletin forum? Try changing the names of your categories to specifically the keywords that your website is about and want to generate traffic from. If your url setup is SEO Friendly, they will include your keywords from categories. Next step is to have related content in those categories. Having forums called “general discussion” does not separate yourself from the millions of other forums out there.
3. If your looking to build your vBulletin forum, make sure to tweet posts automatically to Twitter. Twitter is great for building lots of back links over time. Do not underestimate it…even if all these new social sites can be overwhelming..and annoying at times.
4. To improve security on your vBulletin forum, make sure your admin account name isn’t “admin” and your admincp directory is renamed.’
5. Installing your forum, doing your keyword research, and posting on it is only 1/4 of the battle. Make sure you create the environment caters to your niche. Not only to keep your members on your forum, but also to drive new ones.
6.Organic traffic, or traffic from Google is the best type of traffic to growing your forum massive. This is done by having lots of quality threads related to the topic of your forum.
7. Less mods are better than more mods! vBulletin.org mods are not checked by anyone except the developers of that modification. By allowing your forum to have more mods, your creating more vulnerabilities.
8.Create your forum category names with precision, mainly your keywords, as that is what your URL Canocials will be, which will ultimately affect your SEO, or search engine optimization.
9. The theme of your forum brings out the personality and uniqueness of your forum. Make sure its clean, easy to navigate, and stands out from your competitors.
10. A good forum building technique to deploy is an Introduction section, all new members should introduce themselves and answer 4 main criteria:
1. How did they find your site?
2. What do they like most?
3. What do they hate most?
4. What do they love about the community?
This will give you excellent feedback on how your attracting your userbase, what you need to change, keep the same, as well as bond your community together, as new members will love to see other members visiting.
11. We’ve noticed that users on our Gamer forum tend to use our Facebook Connect integration over our typical vBulletin registration form. However they will change their avatar/profile pic upon logging in. If you have a lot of visitors coming to your pages, make sure you implement a Facebook Connect button or you’ll be losing valuable members.
12. Most vBulletin forums fail within the first year. Two things to have in forums, people visiting the forum, and second, getting those people to post. Encourage activity by having monthly competitions, and participating with your members in discussions. In time, you can step back from the conversation, but this is necessary.
13. Start monetizing your traffic to your site and earn up to $90 per commission with vBSocial.com Affiliates:
http://vbsocial.com/affiliates
14. If your url is “yourforum.com/forum.php” and you don’t have cms set up, you can eliminate the long url and change it to forum.php simply by renaming forum.php to index.php and deleting the old index.php.
15. You can and should increase registration times by using Facebook Connect and our super fast regristration code tweaks. I myself, and many other users hate filling out long forums just to post on YOUR forum.
Faster registration = More members. See link below in comments for source code
http://vbsocial.com/forum/showthread.php/1610-Faster-vBulletin-4-Registration?p=3716#post3716
16. Building a team of moderators, and global moderators not only helps protect the community and the forum, it also makes forums more lively. Finding the right team is critical, be picky, have applications, and become the chooser. Your forum will rely on your team for their support and help.
17. Make sure your meta description for your vBulletin forum is user friendly and not just keyword stuffed. A/B test your meta tags, you’ll notice increased clickthrough from google search using targeted meta descriptions on your important pages.
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