T-Bucket Forums Blog

A lot has been happening around the T-Bucket Forums over the course of the last 2-3 weeks.  Some of those happenings have managed to derail our weekly statistics, but we’re ready to start picking up where we left off with the numbers.

First things first - we’re sorry to report that one of the T-Bucket Forums’ long-time moderators has decided to step aside.  Rick has been working on the T-Bucket Forums staff for several months and we’re going to miss having his input on some of the decision-making.  Rick, we wish you the very best and look forward to seeing you on the forums.

If you’ve been following the weekly statistical reports on this blog, you’ll doubtless be aware that we’ve had some concern over how poorly the site has been ranking in some of the search engine results pages.  Sure, we’ve been getting traffic, and yes, we’ve also been getting some new members.  But we have felt all along that we could improve the numbers, all the way around.

We’ve been making some template changes to the T-Bucket Forums, trying to make the site more appealing for the search engine spiders and bots.  We’ve been trying to get rid of unnecessary bits of code, so the search engines won’t have to look so long and hard to find our content.

We’ve been very fortunate in the last couple months, as our sponsors and some special friends of the T-Bucket Forums have provided enough funding for us to make some very positive changes.  Our move to a KnownHost virtual private server has got the site running much quicker and with room to grow.  One week ago, we stepped up and purchased a very powerful piece of search engine optimization software for vBulletin forums, a script known as vBSEO.

Already, within one week, we are starting to see some positive results from vBSEO.  We were using a piece of SEO software prior to installing vBSEO, so we weren’t really looking for any earth-shaking numbers to fall out.  And the numbers may not be earth-shaking, but overall, they are already showing positive trends.

So let’s look at some numbers.

The forum has 920 threads, 9,256 threads, 452 members and 204 active members.  Over the course of the last two weeks, we’ve gained 83 threads, 847 posts, 22 members and 9 more active members.

Currently, Google is showing 3.500 indexed pages.  Two weeks ago, that number was at 3,640, but had fallen all the way to 2,790 one week ago.  We’ve recovered nearly all the indexed pages we had, which is not typical with new installs of vBSEO.  Typically, a site will lose a large number of its indexed pages, as vBSEO is rewriting forum URL’s in a completely different format.  But we’re holding our own, to this point.

And this is where we’re going to start looking at some numbers a bit differently.  And we’re going to be looking at some entirely new numbers.

There is a statistic known as Bounce Rate.  Bounce rate is measured by the number of visitors that visit a site and leave the site without ever looking at a second page.  Obviously, the lower a bounce rate percentage number is, the better.  A lower percentage indicates that when people visit a site, they find it interesting enough to look around a bit.  We already had a pretty good bounce rate, for the site, but we’re watching it improve.  Last Saturday, the overall bounce rate for a 30 day time period was 13.42%.  As of today, that same number has dropped to 11.65%.  Our bounce rate has been under 2.5% for the last 3 days.  Thursday, the bounce rate was at ZERO!  Every single visitor to the site stayed long enough to view at least one more page.

We use a piece of software that tracks all the visits to the site from the search engines.  It also tracks how many keywords are being used in search terms, for these people to find us.  It’s been frustrating to see that over the last several weeks, there has been little change to the number of keywords used to find the site.  Fortunately, vBSEO is helping us correct that problem.

In just 7 days, we’ve seen a rather flat-line graph take a very positive upward turn.

This graph shows fourteen points of data, the number of search engine keywords used to find the  site over the previous 30 days of each point.  The vertical red line indicates the day we installed vBSEO.  And you can see the numbers have climbed, significantly, since that day.  If we can just keep this one metric alive, it will mean more and more search engine traffic arriving at the T-Bucket Forums.  And when our bounce rate is looking as good as it does, more visits are likely going to bring us more members.

As of this afternoon, our top 20 Google search terms are all showing some positive positioning, as well.  Of the 20, 4 were number 1, 1 was number 2, 1 was number 3, 3 were number 4, 1 was number 6, 2 were number 7, 5 were number 8, 1 was number 10, 1 was number 11 and 1 was number 28.  Of the 20, 18 were all on page one.  The 19th was only one spot off page 1.

Yesterday, we added another powerful script to the T-bucket Forums, called GARS, or the Geek’s Articles and Reviews System.  This script allows us to transform some of our forums into newly-formatted Articles forums, Reviews forums and Tutorials forums.  It lays the information out into a more professional format and allows the articles to be printed in the same format.  We encourage our members to add as many technical articles as they care to write, as this will help cement the T-Bucket Forums’ position as the Internet’s leading T-Bucket information resource.

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