vBulletin SEO Setup

When any forum launches and they have a goal to use advertising programs to generate some revenue to either, A. Cover the server costs, or B. Make them rich. The problem most forums have is that the content is all user generated, this is bad because users aren’t aware of how to optimize their posts to make you money and when they create their posts your adsense targeting starts to become diluted and you’ll notice sometimes you won’t have ads that represent what the thread is about. Which will lead to less visitors clicking thru the ads and adsense delivering some weird advertisements.

The first tip we bring you is section targeting, this only applies to adsense but since its one of the main programs forum webmasters use we’ll be using it for our examples. Section targeting allows you to suggest sections of your text and HTML content that you’d like us to emphasize or downplay when matching ads to your site’s content. By providing us with your suggestions, you can assist us in improving your ad targeting. To implement section targeting, you’ll need to add a set of special HTML comment tags to your code. These tags will mark the beginning and end of whichever section(s) you’d like to emphasize or de-emphasize for ad targeting. Since most forums content is user generated posts we’ll be making a template modification to either postbit or postbit_legacy template depending on which you use. We assume you know how to edit a template, so find these templates in your style manager under ‘Postbit Templates’.

<!-- message --><div id="post_message_$post[postid]“>$post[message]</div>
<!? / message ?>

Now why do we want to add this line: This tells the adsense spider, Hey here comes some important content, target my advertisement to this stuff please! Then after the we want to tell the spider, We’re all out of important content here, you don’t have to go home, but you’ll have to find some more else where! Your final product should look something similar to this.

<!-- google_ad_section_start --><!-- message -->

<div id="post_message_$post[postid]“>$post[message]</div>

<!– / message –>
<!? google_ad_section_end ?>

You should now receive slightly more targeted advertisements when viewing threads. If you are using software such as vBSEO there is an option to automatically have these comments inserted to your page. If you are using their relevant replacement feature, we also recommend adding the targeted section code around that as well. To take full advantage of this method, you’ll need to include a lot of information inside these tags on each page. Any place that you’ve got good content you should target with this method, not simply the post information for the pages.

If you’ve got a forum full of junk, and you’ve got content outside of the user generated posts you can also choose to ignore the $post[message] area so it does not get factored into what advertisements are served up. To do this simply use this instead. This tells the adsense spider Hey, see this stuff right here, it’s all hogwash and doesn’t really mean what the page is about, don’t pay any attention to it. Be sure you end the ignore section as well with.

You can find more great tips to increase your revenue at SEO for vBulletin