vBulletin SEO Setup

All serious webmasters have spent hours working on monetizing their vBulletin forums, making sure their AdSense ads are correctly positioned, colored, and filtered, and that their Search Engine Optimization is top-notch. But many leave small gaps in their monetization strategies; their AdSense ads might be showing too many public service announcements, for instance. Or members could be recommending books and movies from Amazon to each other without your affiliate ID getting in the links. Such things may not affect your bottom line very much each month, but over time, and with increased readership, these losses could add up. In these tough economic times, it’s worth taking a few minutes to plug these revenue holes.

Amazon

You don’t have to be actively pushing books, movies, and other items from Amazon to make a few bucks from it; sometimes your members will happily do it for you. You can use the Dynamic Amazon Links mod to insert your Amazon affiliate ID any time one of your members links to an Amazon page. Simply follow these steps:

• If you haven’t already, go sign up for an Amazon Associates account.
• Download Dynamic Amazon Links
• Edit the functions_amazon_links.php file to include your associates ID, then import vbulletin-plugins.xml via the Plugin Manager. The Dynamic Amazon Links plugin also works with Amazon.de and Amazon.ca.

There are other mods like Geek Auto-Linker that do much the same thing, but Dynamic Amazon Links is free and easy to implement. GAL has many other functions and can even format those Amazon links with product images, so if your members want to do book or movie reviews for each other that’s something you should consider.

Through the Eyes of the Color Blind

Did you know about 1% of all males have protanopia, the most common form of color blindness? If you’re getting 1000 men visiting your site each day, that’s 10 who may have trouble distinguishing your ad colors. Run your page through the [url=http://colorfilter.wickline.org/]Colorblind Web Page Filter[/url] to see if you have any trouble reading it.

Put Adsense Banners in your Archive

I’ve discovered that some of my overseas members actually prefer to browse in the archives; it loads faster and doesn’t have any distracting graphics. If I didn’t have my AdSense ads in the archive, they’d probably never see any ads at all. It’s very simple to implement, too. Download the mod at Put AdSense Banners in your Archive.

Some people have their archives hidden in robots.txt to prevent duplicate content from getting into Google, but if they’re still accessible to your members you could always disallow all bots except the AdSense ones from the archives subdirectory.

Google Public Service Announcements

If you’re running Google AdSense, you may have noticed that Google sometimes runs Public Service Announcements urging you to donate to various organizations. They say the PSAs are used when they haven’t properly indexed your page yet or they don’t have any appropriate advertisements in their inventory, but some webmasters have noticed a disproportionate number of PSAs on pages containing terms like “battered woman”, “kidnapping”, and other terms related to crime, death or injury.

Whether that’s motivated by their marketing department’s decision to protect the Google brand or a genuine desire to help victims is impossible to say. If you want to do your part, leave the PSAs as is. But if you want to reduce their frequency, check the following:

• Is your robots.txt file allowing the spiders in?
• Determine if there’s anything about your pages that makes it hard for a robot to read them. (Lots of images containing text, no alt tags, etc.)
• Make sure you have enough text content on each page.
• Identify any “negative keywords” that might be present and think about altering them… “nabbed” for “kidnapped”, for example.

AdSense Alternate Ads

If your efforts to reduce the frequency of PSA are ineffective, consider exercising your alternate ads option. For a long time I didn’t make use of them, thinking my only options were to use my own adserver or include a static image. But after searching Google one day I found there are some ad networks trying to take advantage of your unsold inventory:
http://psabox.com/
http://www.alternutad.com/
http://www.alternateurl.com/
http://www.alternate-url-ads.com/

But if you’d rather use that excess inventory to promote your own sites, follow these instructions from Google to create a HTML page with a clickable image:
Use absolute URLs: we suggest using absolute URLs when you’re coding this HTML page. An absolute URL is one that includes the entire, fully-defined path. This ensures that you won’t run into any errors when placing the code on various pages of your site.
Use target=”_top”: this code tells your browser which window to use when loading the destination page of your clickable image. If you don’t include this tag in your code (and we’ll show you where to include it below) your browser will try to load your destination within the ad format itself.

Here’s a sample HTML page that follows the guidelines. Simply substitute your own page and image, upload, then set your alternate ad url.

<html>
<head>
<title></title>
</head>
<body>

<a href="http://www.yoursite.com" target="_top"><img src="http://www.yoursite.com/images/altad.jpg"></a>

</body>
</html>

If you don’t use AdSense, you might still benefit from alternate ads; they’re also used by some other ad networks like Tribal Fusion. Consult your ad network for more information.

Once you’ve plugged these revenue holes, you might make a little extra each month. It may not seem like much, but frugality is a good way to get rich.