VBSEO Install

[Toon]

In a nutshell I bought the program to rewrite descriptive url's. When using user constructed php the url ends up as a combination of php script and numbers usually and this is not great for Search Engines to read and rank. The programme renames each page with the thread title as a readable url.

For example before this thread would have been called something like..

graphic-design-forum.com/post-3305-#post34197

But now it's rewritten as...

graphic-design-forum.com/graphic-design-forum-announcements/3305-vbseo-install.html#post34197

So it now contains the important keywords - 'graphic-design-forum-announcements' and 'vbseo-install' and will rank higher in google.

Also what you don't see is it rewrites the META description and META keywords with relevant text from the content of the page.
For example my META keywords on the home page would contain photography, typography, films, sports etc. They have no relevance to this page what so ever so the meta description and keywords don't match the main contents making for very, very bad SEO.

Also it adds the bookmarking option which I plead with people to use. As a forum grows many post will get burried and because some user don't use descriptive enough thread titles it can be hard to search for old threads to reference. Bookmarking them with del.icio.us, furl or technorati can make finding them a lot easier for the user in the future. Also tagging the posts or thread make them easier to find and easy to share with others in a social way.

Digg is really just a sharing option if a thread is of interest to alot of people you can digg it and then email if via digg to 6 other people and they might pass it on etc. Not only is it great advertising for the forum it is what can spread a story (or in our case a nice piece of design work) worldwide.

Because these are all quite new I would say only 20% of forum users actually use these methods so it might be hard getting people used to using them.

All I can say is give it a try and in the future we shouldn't have to search about for threads or posts to reference.

Hope this makes a little bit more sense. After 8 hours I was pretty stressed feeling a little better about it this morning though. I will answer any more questions if anybody has any.

Thanks

Toon

[ianm]

a few annoying glitches going on, threads i've marked read aren't staying read and it's slow to update when i make a post as in it still shows the previous poster on the thread. but i guess that's just teething trouble :)

[Toon]

Thread you've marked read?? I don't get it they are automatically marked read when you've viewed them you shouldn't have to mark them yourself?

as in it still shows the previous poster on the thread

Explain a bit better

[ianm]

i can't explain better, that's what happens - it just requires a refresh of the page though and all is well

[Toon]

That's you browser otherwise it would be doing it on mine as well, it's the cookies that set the topic as read.

[mick young]

all fine here

[ianm]

well it was no bother before you installed this new stuff

[Toon]

Still don't understand what you mean by

as in it still shows the previous poster on the thread

Unless you're using the back button?

[katie roos]

seems to work the same to me? It won't mark as read by using the back button because you are going back to before the cookie was stored.

[El Peligroso]

sometimes when you post then jump straight back to the main page the thread remains marked as though it has an unread post, but if you go back into it it gets rid of it... only noticed it on the off topic one though i think