The folks over at Jelsoft recently launched a Blog add-on named vBulletin Blog (vBlog). Many community admins are taking this opportunity to add a blog to their forums. 

NuSEO.PHP version 1.6 first introduced support for vBlog. And now we are happy to announce a slew of new features added to NuSEO.PHP v1.7 RC1 which enable full configuration and customization of your vBlog site structure.

Take your blogs outside the forums

vBlog as most vBulletin add-ons reside inside vBulletin's installation directory. This means that if your forums are installed at http://www.domain.com/forums/, then the blog's default location is http://www.domain.com/forums/blog.php, even if using a third party rewrite tool, you usually end up with a URL like this: http://www.domain.com/forums/blog/.

NuSEO.PHP, being a site-wide SEO application, let's you design and customize your site's URL structure. For instance, here at NuHIT, the forums are located at http://www.nuhit.com/forums/, and the blogs are located at http://www.nuhit.com/blog/

Wildcard Domains: Add your members' usernames to their blog domain name

NuSEO.PHP version 1.7 adds full support for Wildcard Domains. Setting the Blog URL Format with NuSEO.PHP's Admin CP to "http://[user_name].nuhit.com/blog/" produces URLs such as this for your members blogs: elfmage.nuhit.com/blog/

This support extends to any other NuSEO.PHP module like vBulletin, phpFox, PhotoPost, etc. For instance, vBulletin members's profiles can be configured for URLs like this: elfmage.nuhit.com/profile/

(Notice that to enable this feature you have to configure your DNS with a wildcard DNS entry. We'll be posting instructions on how to do this soon.)

Social Bookmarking for vBlog

What good is a Web 2.0 Blog without Web 2.0 Social Bookmarks?

NuSEO.PHP let's you choose from over 20 different social bookmarking networks out of the box. You can see the icons at the top of each blog post.

In addition to the build-in social bookmarking networks, you can add custom networks if needed.

Optimizing vBlog Templates for SEO

JelSoft's team decided to add a left-hand column to vBlog's design. What seems like a rather small decision can have a large impact on SEO. In addition to vBulletin's header and navbar, now search engines have to skip all of the left hand column to find the page content.

We will be expanding on this issue and how to manually edit the templates in a later post.