The BritishV8 Pub

general notices, announcements, invitations, & social stuff (like meets & car shows)

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Moderator
Curtis Jacobson
Portland Oregon
(4576 posts)

Registered:
10/12/2007 02:16AM

Main British Car:
71 MGBGT, Buick 215

authors avatar
The more the merrier!
Posted by: Moderator
Date: January 03, 2009 07:42AM

There are a LOT of upgrades for British cars that have little or nothing to do with engine swaps. For example, right now there's a great thread on our MG forum about installing a turbo on a Midget (1500) engine. Other obvious examples include fitting larger/wider wheels/tires, dashboard conversions and aftermarket gauges, custom interiors and upgraded seats, installing A/C, upgrading wiring and circuit protection, installing an EFI system, suspension and brake upgrades, "chrome bumper conversions", etc., etc., etc.

Our community already has tons of expertise in all these areas.

In my opinion, we tend to be more supportive & less judgmental than some of the other British car forums.

There are lots of benefits for our community being seen as distinct from purists and/or the traditional restoration crowd. For one thing, we demonstrate that there's a market for new aftermarket products and services that are specific to our applications and that it's feasible to advertise and sell to the "British Resto-Mod" niche.

So, the question is:
What can be done to promote the BritishV8 message board to folks who aren’t “engine swappers”?

We have about 500 registered forum users now. How do we make it 5000?

Post suggestions here!


rficalora
Rob Ficalora
Willis, TX
(2764 posts)

Registered:
10/24/2007 02:46PM

Main British Car:
'76 MGB w/CB front, Sebring rear, early metal dash Ford 302

authors avatar
Re: The more the merrier!
Posted by: rficalora
Date: January 03, 2009 09:41PM

As much of a pain as it may be, one of the best ways would probably be to change the name of the web site from 'British V8' to something that better describes the target audience.


BlownMGB-V8
Jim Blackwood
9406 Gunpowder Rd., Florence, KY 41042
(6468 posts)

Registered:
10/23/2007 12:59PM

Main British Car:
1971 MGB Blown,Injected,Intercooled Buick 340/AA80E/JagIRS

authors avatar
Re: The more the merrier!
Posted by: BlownMGB-V8
Date: January 03, 2009 11:08PM

To what? Spurious?

Jim


Moderator
Curtis Jacobson
Portland Oregon
(4576 posts)

Registered:
10/12/2007 02:16AM

Main British Car:
71 MGBGT, Buick 215

authors avatar
Re: The more the merrier!
Posted by: Moderator
Date: January 03, 2009 11:15PM

Why did you have to go and open that can of worms!?! (We'll probably have sixty posts debating that idea by morning.) I probably wouldn't have picked the name "BritishV8"... but it's one thing I'm not going to change. I'll leave that for "the next guy".


74ls1tr6
Calvin Grannis
Elk Grove,CA
(1151 posts)

Registered:
11/10/2007 10:05AM

Main British Car:
74 TR6 / 71 MGB GT TR6/Ls1 71 MGB GT/Ls1

authors avatar
Re: The more the merrier!
Posted by: 74ls1tr6
Date: January 04, 2009 12:13AM

When anyone looks for something on the web, what do they do? They will put a phrase or keyword in a search box like the one on this site.

This site needs to be in or submited in all the big search engines with the right keyword/phrase + meta taged for each page. So all the killer information that this site offers needs to index into the search engines. We want this site to come up on a search engine results within the first top 3 or on the bottom of the first page of the search. This is the way to get site exposure.

So for an example......My website....I sell water softeners made by GE (General Electric).The valve that I use is the GE logix controller. OK, so go to Google.com put in a search for {GE logix}. You will probably see that my website will come up around the 4th spot on the first searched page (www.waterhookup.com). The more hits per-day the better

All the information needs to index into the search engines. If you want to see where this site comes up on a search, put in search words/phrase into google search. Now I have tried several and this site will come up on some, but there is alot more information that the search engines are not picking up.

So Curtis, my question to you would be, how well equiped is this site for setting up keywords or phrases that the search engines
can pick up on?

Also the search engines will look at link popularity to how and where you will end up in a search.

Your main home page should be indexing with the wording that will drive more traffic to this site, so the home page needs to have the wording right for what group of people you want.

Keywords examples:

MGB GT mods
british engine swaps
Triumph electric windows
bolt in MG suspension
Triumph frame upgrades
MG differential swaps

There are sites for reverse keyword search that will give you an idea of how many hits the population searches for.

The more traffic you have and able for them to find the information quickly the better(User friendly).

My 2 cents.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/04/2009 12:16AM by 74ls1tr6.


Moderator
Curtis Jacobson
Portland Oregon
(4576 posts)

Registered:
10/12/2007 02:16AM

Main British Car:
71 MGBGT, Buick 215

authors avatar
Re: The more the merrier!
Posted by: Moderator
Date: January 04, 2009 03:31AM

Calvin asked:

Quote:
how well equipped is this site for setting up keywords or phrases that the search engines can pick up on?

It's a great question! Not so easy to answer though...

BritishV8 is actually two websites on two different servers: one for the "magazine" and one for the forums. A lot of thought and work has gone into the magazine site to make it perform pretty well in search engines. Google has indexed almost every page and we get referrals on an amazing variety of keyword combinations. (We get referred visits on about 15,000 unique keyword combinations every month.) We seem to do especially well in Google Image Search and similar engines because of disciplined use of "alternate image tags" and captions. We have a good site map...

The forum is another story. Although the search engine spiders deep-crawl our forum frequently, we're still not well indexed yet. I believe this is largely due to a glaring problem with the basic "Phorum 5.1" engine that we use... specifically that it assigned the exact same title and meta tags ("description" and "keywords") for every single forum page - until tonight!!! I've just added a hack to fix that problem. It's not quite perfect yet - but now we'll have a unique "title" and "description" for every forum page/thread. (The "description" is equal to the first 150 characters of the post.) Google and Google-users should like that! I'm not sure what to focus on next though: Phorum's (numeric) URL's certainly aren't ideal, and I haven't figured out a good solution for keyword meta tags or any solution at all for alt image tags.

Of course, more inbound links would do a world of good.

Philosophically, I tend to think that adding more and more quality articles should be highest priority, but maybe I should revisit that. Parsing articles so that they have a condensed or summary view on one page and an extended version on a second page might have a very big SEO advantage - although as a website user I think it's a terribly inconvenient solution. I'm thinking that we're pretty long overdue for setting up a blog and some sort of RSS-feed system. I'm not convinced that my human visitors care much about these things, but the advantages in terms of search engine placement might make them worthwhile. All these ideas cost time to implement, don't they?

I'd be delighted to hear more suggestions along any of these lines! You can tinker with this stuff a lot and still miss obvious stuff.


MGBV8
Carl Floyd
Kingsport, TN
(4511 posts)

Registered:
10/23/2007 11:32PM

Main British Car:
1979 MGB Buick 215

authors avatar
Re: The more the merrier!
Posted by: MGBV8
Date: January 04, 2009 10:16AM

Quote:
Parsing articles so that they have a condensed or summary view on one page and an extended version on a second page might have a very big SEO advantage - although as a website user I think it's a terribly inconvenient solution.

Speaking for myself, I wouldn't find one mouse click to more info inconvenient at all.


BlownMGB-V8
Jim Blackwood
9406 Gunpowder Rd., Florence, KY 41042
(6468 posts)

Registered:
10/23/2007 12:59PM

Main British Car:
1971 MGB Blown,Injected,Intercooled Buick 340/AA80E/JagIRS

authors avatar
Re: The more the merrier!
Posted by: BlownMGB-V8
Date: January 04, 2009 11:22AM

In terms of the forum, I'd like to see the ability to search a long thread in it's entirety rather than page by page, and maybe that's what the changes you just made are designed to do. It's a user friendliness thing, say if I run a search for coil-over shocks and get a half dozen links on the forum. At least one of those links is going to go to a multi-page thread, and the reference most likely won't be on the first page.

The condensed first page sounds good, but who is going to write them? Sounds like a lot of work.

Jim


mowog1
Rick Ingram
Central Illinois
(1523 posts)

Registered:
10/17/2007 09:36PM

Main British Car:
1974.5 MGB/GT 3.9l Rover

authors avatar
Re: The more the merrier!
Posted by: mowog1
Date: January 04, 2009 12:02PM

X


Moderator
Curtis Jacobson
Portland Oregon
(4576 posts)

Registered:
10/12/2007 02:16AM

Main British Car:
71 MGBGT, Buick 215

authors avatar
Re: The more the merrier!
Posted by: Moderator
Date: January 05, 2009 12:21AM

Quote:
In terms of the forum, I'd like to see the ability to search a long thread in it's entirety rather than page by page, and maybe that's what the changes you just made are designed to do. It's a user friendliness thing, say if I run a search for coil-over shocks and get a half dozen links on the forum. At least one of those links is going to go to a multi-page thread, and the reference most likely won't be on the first page.

There's a good way to handle this... but it might take me a couple weeks to think of it, and possibly longer to implement it. I'll put thinking-about-it on the to-do list.

Quote:
The condensed first page sounds good, but who is going to write them? Sounds like a lot of work.

Yeah. Even more work to make sure things print out right. (I'm told that's a key concern to some readers.) However, it would be really nice if the home page were updated every day or two with citations from new articles. Those quick one or two paragraph teasers would lure visitors deeper into the site - and at the same time the teaser might provide the content-summary (keywords) that we want for other reasons.

That's more than I want to think about website design tonight.




New question:

Should BritishV8 advertise in other magazines? For example, for "less than $11 per month" we could have a full color ad in "MGB Driver" magazine. (Maybe we could trade something to get that sort of exposure with even less cash.)

What other ways can we reach enthusiasts who don't spend a lot of time online?


alana
alan atkinson
10567
(232 posts)

Registered:
06/19/2008 08:06PM

Main British Car:
68 TR250 LS2

authors avatar
Re: The more the merrier!
Posted by: alana
Date: January 09, 2009 01:32PM

You could always register a couple of other names and just point them here. A line at the top saying it's for all modded Brit cars would at least have them take a look.

"BritishModifiedCars"
"BetterBritishCars"
"UpgradedBritishCars"

You get the idea.

Just a thought.


Moderator
Curtis Jacobson
Portland Oregon
(4576 posts)

Registered:
10/12/2007 02:16AM

Main British Car:
71 MGBGT, Buick 215

authors avatar
Re: The more the merrier!
Posted by: Moderator
Date: January 09, 2009 09:26PM

It's a good thought too, but to really get the benefit I'd need to put unique content on the home page of those new URL's. In other words, at "BritishModifiedCars.com" I'd need a unique new page that uses the keyword combination "British modified cars" in its title, in its "description" tag, in its header ("h1") tag, and a couple places in its page text. Without putting that sort of content on BritishModifiedCars.com, Google won't rank it very high, and no one will actually see it. Ideally, the new BritishModifiedCars site should have some unique value so that people will link to it. That said, in principle, small satellite sites are a good idea.


GUESS WHAT! - It's official: I now own "BRITISHV8.COM"

I've wanted it since I started messing with BritishV8, but some slimy scumbag was squatting on it. He wanted me to pay $4000 for that web address! Can you believe it? Finally, he let it expire. Even then, three different companies volunteered to procure the dot-com domain name for me for just $199 - but I already had it on "back order" (with GoDaddy, for about $20) so it's mine finally. (I set up a "301 redirect" on it...) The BENEFIT? Now when someone mistakenly types "dot com" instead of "dot org", they'll find the REAL BritishV8 website instead of some page that says the britishv8 domain name is for sale. This has subtle side benefits. For example, when designing a bumper sticker, I can reasonably leave off the domain name extension (dot whatever) because there's little danger of someone going to the wrong BritishV8.


mowog1
Rick Ingram
Central Illinois
(1523 posts)

Registered:
10/17/2007 09:36PM

Main British Car:
1974.5 MGB/GT 3.9l Rover

authors avatar
Re: The more the merrier!
Posted by: mowog1
Date: January 09, 2009 10:37PM

Nice coup, Curtis!

But...if you leave the "dot org/dot com" off of the bumper sticker....how would you be promoting the website?

A simple "British V8" doesn't get the complete message across...to those "outside of the loop".

FWIW - YOMV


MGBV8
Carl Floyd
Kingsport, TN
(4511 posts)

Registered:
10/23/2007 11:32PM

Main British Car:
1979 MGB Buick 215

authors avatar
Re: The more the merrier!
Posted by: MGBV8
Date: January 09, 2009 11:21PM

Exactly what I was wondering!


Mr. T
Tony Andrews
Kent Island, Maryland
(153 posts)

Registered:
10/23/2007 03:59PM

Main British Car:
'75 mgb, '74 grille, morspeed bumpers Rover 3.9

authors avatar
Re: The more the merrier!
Posted by: Mr. T
Date: January 10, 2009 11:28AM

1) WAY to go Curtis!

2) As soon as the martians land on earth, some of you will already know how to speak their language.


BMC
Brian Mc Cullough
Forest Lake, Minnesota, USA
(383 posts)

Registered:
10/30/2007 02:27AM

Main British Car:
1980 MGB '95 3.4L 'L32' SFI V6, GM V6T5 & 3.42 Limi

authors avatar
Re: The more the merrier!
Posted by: BMC
Date: January 11, 2009 03:28PM

Darn!

I was waiting for that BritishV8.com to open up so we could redirect traffic to our webstore: [mgv6.com]

I am joking but I do like the idea of redirects. They really don't bring much in for us but the possibilities are worth the chance.

Seriously, I have no issues with people who take close web addresses as long as they are not taking over someone else's address without permission or the other site or company going out of business. In the distant future, we will be taking on more names to direct traffic our way. At the same time, our site directs traffic out as well- as I believe it should!
links: [bmcautos.com]


As far as this sites name, I have no suggestion for changing it. To redirect and have a few leading pages may eventually help. A Sunbeam or MGB SCCA builder/driver may never consider this site only because they may get the first impression of the engine swap only. I often wonder when I walk into a shop or a website if this is going to be a car polish and intake swap website or if its going to be a real website where they switch gearing and weights and springs to match other items on the car. My impression of most "fast" street cars 30 some years ago was a guy who adds lots of power, jacks the rear end up to get wide tires and has no clue that the suspension, brakes, weight bias and driveline just will not keep up with his engine. If I see a well balanced site, it impresses me to look for more.

I just reviewed the home page on this site. It includes a pretty good description of everything and the word "Modified" is very prevalent. The pictures that cycle are bodywork, body mods, SCCA type race cars, Gasser (Drag) race cars, interiors (race and street) and various members at events. I say that is pretty good. The only thing I would add to that is maybe a picture of a V6 Midget, Alpine, MGB or a turbocharged I4 anything to broaden what we show. That and/or add a few words in the description that is a little more open for other engine types. I have issue with changing the words since they are written so well, I don't think it would be easy to change. Its the only down side to the term V8 that it can be perceived as somewhat exclusive by new visitors and think Curtis has done wonders to build this site. Hats off to Curtis!

-BMC.


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