Should I wait until my board becomes larger?

[Lionsloser07]

Hi everyone. I was wondering if you think I should wait until my board becomes larger. Right now it is sort of small because no one knows about it. However, if I was to spend the money and use vBSEO, people might not want to post because nobody else is posting. Please help.

Motown Sports Center

[Ace Shattock]

Hi Lions,

It's often said 'it's never too early to optimise your site', and that holds true for vBulletin/vBSEO.

While you will still need to work to get more members, through adding content that they want to register to become a part of, vBSEO would be helping them find you through the Search Engine Results.

[briansol]

vbseo can only do so much. You have VERY limited content. Wihtout content, vbseo won't help you. It's sorta a double edged sword-- you need members to get content, but you need content to get members and search hits.

Installing vbseo without you doing anything probably won't do much for you at all.
BUT, if you spend some time, and get some articles/content together, vbseo will help you get it out there for others to find.

[Joe Ward]

vBSEO should always be installed as early as possible to accelerate your success.

However, be sure that you are committed to running the forum. Once you make the investment in vBulletin + vBSEO (as Brian and Ace indicated) you have to be committed to getting the content started. As with all new forums that will take some work on your part.

Luckily, vBSEO will be there optimizing every new page you create right from the beginning, maximizing your chances of getting hits to each page, and eventually posters, and building out your uber important: search long tail! In the forum world, that's the stuff that dreams are made of.

One of the key things for you is to ensure that you start out "seeding" your forum with some really cool content. Create a thread with a title so interesting, I could not possibly leave without finding out what it's all about. Make a statement that is so controversial, I just have to respond. Ask a question that many people would like to know the answer to. That is the type of stuff that will help people start posting responses, and eventually creating their own discussion threads.

You get the content started, and vBSEO will handle the hits. But it is an investment, so please make sure you are committed to keeping your forum active, so that you can give yourself a chance a big success.

Please let us know if you have any other questions we can help you with.

[Lionsloser07]

Will vBSEO automatically make an RSS feed for all of my pages?

[briansol]

rss is built into vbulletin.

vbseo_sitemap generator will make an XML file for google webmasters area. it is a seperate (free) product.

[Lionsloser07]

Are you sure it is built into vBulletin? Because in my ACP it asks if I want to add an RSS feed.

[briansol]

you're in the wrong thing...

thats the RSS poster, which will READ an RSS feed and turn it into posts.

the rss is built in. if you use firefox, click the orange rss icon in the url bar.

ie this thread has 2-- both the main site, and this particular forum.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="vBulletin SEO Forums RSS Feed" href="http://www.vbseo.com/external.php?type=RSS2" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="vBulletin SEO Forums - General Discussion - RSS Feed" href="http://www.vbseo.com/external.php?type=RSS2&amp;forumids=2" />