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We remain dedicated to making this one of the more comfortable and informative T-Bucket forums on the Internet. With that goal in mind, we have been working in the background, trying to make this forum more friendly to the various search engines that visit here.

Every 24 hours, we have an automated script that sends a sitemap of the forum to both Google and Yahoo. This enables us to communicate pertinent data to both search engines, so we can benefit from smarter forum crawls.

You may have noticed there is a relatively new information block at the bottom of the forum's main page -

tags5.jpg


The circled module shows how many guests have viewed the forum in the previous 24 hours, but it also shows how many search engine spiders have crawled the site, looking for keywords to use in the search engine results.

We've also added a new script that is working in the background, trying to make the forum files more 'attractive' for the search engines. Instead of a thread file appearing as /forum/showthread.php?t=5, we've got this script changing filenames to look more like this - /forum/powder-coating-questions-t38/index.html

Notice how there are some keywords being used in the second file address? This helps the spiders home in on keywords and phrases to be indexed.

Now we come to yet another new script and this is where we are going to beg your assistance. In most of the forum sections, when you start to submit a new thread, you are going to see something new in the text-entry area -

tags1.jpg

You are going to be prompted to enter some 'tags' for your thread.

First off, let me make it clear that tag entry is OPTIONAL. But I also want to state that entering some tags will be extremely beneficial, because it provides the search engine spiders with more keywords to catalog.

If I were entering tags for this thread, I would use words like search,engine,Google,Yahoo,tags

These tags would be some of the key words this post is actually about.

After submitting the post, the tags then appear in the showthread page -

tags2.jpg

They appear under the navigation bar. If you have really sharp eyes, look at the address bar in this image and you will see how the address for this thread now contains some keywords, as well.

If you are on the main forum page, you will notice there is a new menu item in the navigation bar, called Tags -

tags3.jpg

And if you click on that Tags menu item, it will take you to this page -

tags4.jpg

This page has a tag cloud displayed on it. The cloud is displaying the tags that have been submitted for the forum posts. The word 'automobile' is in a fairly small font, as it has a single tag, while the words 'chassis' and 'kit' have been used in more tags, so they are getting bigger. The words 'performance' and 'total' have been used in even more tags, so they are bigger yet.

And when the next sitemap is transmitted to Google and Yahoo, they will both see this new page in the map, so they will be sure to spider and index this page. And when they do index it, look at the keywords they will be pulling out of this tag cloud.

All of this will pay off over the next few months, so when people do a search on words like T-Bucket, this forum will be listed higher and higher in the results pages.

It is our hope this search engine optimization will pay off with more and more visitors finding this forum and then registering to join in on the discussions. The more participation we see on the forum will be returned by even more visitors being able to find us.

We thank you for taking the time to read this lengthy post and we hope you will help us make this forum more popular for everyone. As always, if you have ideas, suggestions or questions, be sure to contact me via Private Message.
 

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