Page titles, most importantly the index page title, are crucial to how your website will rank in the search engines. Poor page titles can also turn away potential visitors. When a person is searching in Google for a ‘computer help forum’, they may find that the first 4 results have the following page titles: Computer Help Forum, PC Help, Computer Support Forum, and Silly Joe Bytes - Powered by vBulletin. While ‘Silly Joe Bytes’ may be an excellent computer help forum, odds are a general web surfer will pass over this forum because of it’s poor page title.
When choosing a forum page title for your index page, it is important to assign meaning to it. Don’t use a nickname or something you think is cool. It make work if you’re a celebrity like ShoeMoney, but odds are the general web surfer isn’t going to know who you are or what monikers you go by. If you have a computer help forum, then try to keep those keywords in your index page title.
Cleaning Your Page Title
When you install vBulletin, or other forum software, they often include a ‘powered by xxx’ in your page title. By including this in the default, they are lucky enough to get a few forum owners who either don’t care or don’t know how to remove it. Having a page title that says “Dog Forum - Powered by vBulletin” is not as friendly as a page title of just “Dog Forum”. First, the extra words in your page title will take away some of the authority of your main keywords. You want all your strength going to the keywords Dog and Forum, not Powered and vBulletin. And second, it’s not as attractive. Really, no one but webmasters knows what vBulletin is. If a 40 year-old single mom if browsing the internet, she might skip over your entry in Google simple because she’s unfamiliar with what vBulletin is and why it’s in your page title. She’ll just click the next site on the list with a better page title.
So how do you remove the “Powered by vBulletin”? It’s quite simple really. In your VB Admin panel, go to the template editor and select FORUMHOME. In there you will see:
<title><phrase 1=”$vboptions[bbtitle]”>$vbphrase[x_powered_by_vbulletin]</phrase></title>
Keep it simple and remove everything between <title> and </title>. Enter in the title of your choice, such as < title >Computer Help Forum< / title >. It’s that simple. By doing this, your forum will keep the remaining page title structure and edit the index page title only.
As for phpBB 3.0, if you want to edit your page title you need to open the overall_header.php file in your styles/template name folder. You will see a line that looks like this:
<title>{SITENAME} • {L_MCP} • {L_UCP} • {PAGE_TITLE}</title>
From here you can add/edit anything between the < title > tags to create your own custom page title.
In conclusion, having a clean, user friendly page title is very important to the success of your blog. Not only will it move up the SERPs quicker because you have targeted keywords in the title, but you’re forum will appear more approachable to the general browser.
If you are running vBulletin and have the money, I HIGHLY suggest purchasing vBSEO. It will take care of all things SEO related, and will make your life that much easier.
