vBSEO

[brendalk555]

Right now I have the 3.8 version of vBulletin. I have been trying to get more traffic to my website. Someone had mentioned installing the vBSEO plug in. Another person told me to just upgrade to vbulletin 4.0, that I would get everything if I upgraded that the vBseo plug in would offer me. Any advise would be Great!
www.teachmetheway.com

[punchbowl]

I'm not a big fan of vbseo but it offers far more by way of seo than a default install of vb4. vb4 has *some* seo such as 'friendly urls' but not much.

[brendalk555]

Boy, I thought I would get more help than this!

[Ramsesx]

Boy, I thought I would get more help than this!

What kind of help exactly? More answers or "better" answers? If the second one, don't wonder if you get any more answer.

[Steve Machol]

Boy, I thought I would get more help than this!

You can try searching on these forums. This has been discussed to death.

[Loco.M]

also google is a good source.. vbseo reviews
as for my opinion, I wouldn't start a forum without vbseo, but that's just me..

[motowebmaster]

Your forum appears to require user registration before the main forum page and posts are viewable. I found way around this on some parts of your content, but you should resolve that before considering anything SEO-related.

Whatever a guest can't see also can't be indexed by a search engine. There are other ways to encourage user registration without having to block content, vbseo offers a feature that helps to improve SEO when using guest messages/announcements.

If you truly utilize what vbseo offers, it should help. If you just install and forget, it may not be as effective.

[creativepart]

Yes, do what motowebmaster said first.

Then get the free VBSEO Site Map from vb.org and install that and configure it in Google's Webmaster Tools.

Then you have to decide if you want VBSEO as well. Like some others here, I would say it is pretty much mandatory. But it's up to you to decide. Oh, and while 4.X has more functions like VBSEO I would still by VBSEO for a 4.X forum. I have 6 forums, all run VBSEO -- even the forum I run on VB 4.0.

[theque]

I used vbseo on my v3 forum for a year then upgraded to vb4 without vbseo installed and i have noticed no change in traffic what so ever it still going up each day as it grows! I still have my vbseo licence and with the copyright removed

[melbo]

As mentioned above, you need to open your forum up. If your forum isn't open, then Google and other search engines have no way to index your content. vBSEO won't do anything at all for a closed forum.

If I happen to follow a link that leads me to a forum where I have to register before I can view the thread, I hit back and go to the next Search Engine result.

I see a lot of Forum Admins make the mistaken assumption that by limiting view from public, they'll force registration, have a higher number of members which will lead to a more active forum and participation. I've found it to be just the opposite. Wide open forum gets lot's of guests looking and reading and eventually, registering because they like the content and the other users they see and read about there. I get a lot of New User posts that start off something like this: "Hi, lurked here for almost a year and thought it was finally time to register." or "Long time lurker, ...."

I've also found that if you force registration for something: A file download for instance, more than likely the person who landed on that page will register if they really want the PDF but I never see them again after they get what they wanted. Modern web surfers are fickle and want information NOW or they keep pecking until they find it.