Maximise Your Title Tag

Your title tag is one of the most important aspects of Search Engine Optimisation. It tells a Search Engine exactly what the page contains, so you obviously want to target that to your most important search keywords. Here are three things you can do to maximise your title tag with vBulletin.

1. Remove “powered by vBulletin” from your titles

This one’s an oldie but a goodie, who wants to give vBulletin some of your precious title tag juice? Not me! Don’t worry, this is perfectly in line with the vBulletin TOS.

1. Open up your forum’s control panel.
2. Go to Language & Phrases > Search in Phrases
3. In the search box, enter x_powered_by_vbulletin, and make sure “Search in…” is set to Phrase Text and Phrase Variable Name.
4. Edit the phrase, and change it from {1} – Powered by vBulletin to just simply {1}
5. Save the phrase!

2. Change your FORUMHOME title tag.

On my blogging forum, I managed to get to #11 on Google by simply editing the <title> tag in my FORUMHOME to better represent the search terms I wanted to target for.

1. Open the Style Manager in your Control Panel.
2. Expand the Style you want to work with, and then expand the “Forum Home Templates”, finally choosing to edit the FORUMHOME template.
3. Find the <title> tag and edit the text inside of it to better reflect the tags you want to target for.

3. Remove the forum name from thread pages.

The shorter and more succinct your page title is, the easier it is to rank in Search Engines. This third modification is not essential (some people prefer to have the forum title in their) but it can provide some benefits.

1. Go back into your Style Manager and edit the SHOWTHREAD template (in the “Show Thread templates” category)
2. Change the title tag from:

   <title>$thread[prefix_plain_html] $thread[title]<if condition="$pagenumber>1"> - <phrase 1="$pagenumber">$vbphrase[page_x]</phrase></if> - $vboptions[bbtitle]</title>

   to:

   <title>$thread[prefix_plain_html] $thread[title]<if condition="$pagenumber>1"> - <phrase 1="$pagenumber">$vbphrase[page_x]</phrase></if></title>

So there you have it, three simple ways to get maximum SEO benefit from your title tag.