Now you've gotten vBulletin installed it's time to make some quick customizations to your install.

Note: If you're smart (read: not me), you will take note of the changes you've made. This can be done either on a piece of paper or a simple text file on your computer.

The first thing you should do is change your meta data. These are the keywords search engine spiders see for your site. The defaults are vbulletin, jelsoft, and the description usually goes: This is a discussion forum powered by vBulletin.

Okay, open your adminCP: forumurl.com/directory/admincp and login.

On the left hand side expand the vBulletin Options category and click on vBulletin Options. On the right hand side click "General Settings"

Delete all the meta keywords and place words and phrases that you would want people to come to your site by searching for in the search engines.

For instance if your site is about notebooks you'd probably want your keywords to look something like this:

I think you get the general idea here.

Next change the meta description to a brief statement on what you're site is about and maybe some of it's features.

Now that we've done that. Click Save and Go to Image Settings under vBulletin options:

Change your image processing library to ImageMagick6 and enter a path for it, normally this is /usr/bin, you can contact your host to find the full the path.

I would also uncheck all the image verification options. If all these are left checked, chances are your verification image will be very hard to read and prevent real people from registering. We only want to prevent bots from falsely registering.

The reasons for using Image Magick over GD are many but my main reason is, Image Magick will resize a wider range of photo attachments later on in your forums.

Not much else to do in vBulletin Options, except perhaps turn off "Require Click for Quick Reply" under Message Posting and editing options. The required click only adds and extra step of possible confusion for newbies.

Next Up: Image & Attachment Settings.