Low relavence for actual keywords in a forum

[TheTippingPoint]

My website, www.rcnightmare.com has a forum, the most popular entry point for seo traffic.  I have tried unsuccessfully to really make the forum's content outweigh the actual content of the "forum" itself.  For example google analytics says "post" is my strongest keyword across the site.

the forums url is www.rcnightmare.com/forum, I am looking for some answers from people familiar with Vbulletin for things I can change to help this

[RyanKent]

The most popular SEO plugin for vB is vBSEO. Last time I checked it was pretty much the standard choice for vB.

Another choice is to switch to XenForo. VB's original design team led by Kier Darby left vB a couple years ago and created their own forum software, XenForo. XF has many SEO functions built in.

Every post on your site shows a profile in the left column with "Join Date" and "Posts" are fields, so they will show as associated with your site. It is very common and expected on forum sites. You can remove those fields if you want. There are other ways to circumvent the text but it is not generally necessary.

The idea is you can build great pages on your site itself. You can monitor forum traffic to gain an idea of what relevant keywords are driving traffic to your site. Forums will always be sloppy in terms of SEO as you have little control over the content people add and how they format that content.

[TheTippingPoint]

thanks for the thoughtful response.i am currently running vbseo.ive been told to consider replacing the text with images etc? that hold water? i am not super familiar with the backend  is there some settings there to explore

[RyanKent]

ive been told to consider replacing the text with images etc? that hold water?

The bottom line is if you present text to your site's readers, then search engines wish to read it. Search engines have the ability to read text in images (OCR), although they presently don't use the information for search results.

If you were to replace the text with an image, you are supposed to use an ALT tag so both the search engines and people with reading impairments know what the image says. If you were otherwise to replace the text with image for the purpose of manipulating search engines, it is a black hat technique which I would advise against using.

In vBulletin, the admin pages contain options to show or display post counts. If you decided to go with the image route, you would need to modify the appropriate template in the admin section. I would suggest there are better things for you to spend time on to help improve your site.

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Jeremy,

I have a forum in the RC space as well, running on DNN Active Forums (www.rcnvavalcombat.com). My top five most common keywords in GWT are posts, private, combat, ship, forums, and admiral (a user rank). Ryan gives good advice to not sweat it.

Keri