A good SEO strategy.. but with no results yet. What is wrong?

Hello,
by myself in some years I developed a forum with about 6/8000 unique users/day (vbseo instelled ) 45460 discussions, 267720 posts. On 2010 I decided to ask to a professional team of seo to work about the site, to reach a better level.
On august 2010 they started to investigate
On sectember they give me the optimized titles for each boards (I installed a plugin that let the admin add specific metatag for each board)
After this phase, they started link building, by press releases on several websites (they made 3/4 different messages optimized for main contents of the board: travel, restaurants, recipes)

Now, after 5 months from title optimizations, and more then 3 months since first press releases, I still not see any results. Visitors are still the same. Moreover, it seems that now the google cache is not frequently updated, and new post are not well fastly ranked as before.

At the moment the situation is: I asked to famous professionist, I paid many money and rank is the same (or decreased).

What do you think about? Need to wait and have patience or something is going wrong? The site is in signature, thanks

Backlinks at beginning: more than 43,000 (Y!links)
Backlinks now: more than 80,000

It has been my experience that most professional 'seo services' are a rip off. They do a check list of generic items and keyword stuff to no avail.

Here's some quick suggestions:

[How To] Move CSS to file system - vBulletin SEO Forums
Enable HTML clean up function in vbseoCP
WebPagetest - Optimization Check Results
and when 3.6 gold is released, i encourage you to set up the CDN.

You can simply make your site faster and this will provide you more seo gains. Backlinks importance getting lessened by search engines. But still important. You need to get less traffic but well optimized. I think optimizing titles if it's profecionally done can help but this will take some time like 6-8 months. It's more important. When you have alot of traffic from untargetted people and they will bounce and go back to search engine more. And this will make your site worser on the results. When i check your site i realised you have lot of tags used. This will hurt you in long term. This may be the cause of the drop.

I also think good titles and descriptions will help you to reach the top.

Thank you everybody. I just upgraded from vps to a dedicated, and going to update vbseo and follow Brian tips.

Do you think is better to put nofollow to tags page? Or just not include in sidebar and in sitemap?

It depends on the quality of your tags. If you moderate them, it may be good, but most tags are full of junk/spam/non-tag words

In my board I moderate the tags (almost 95% of them). The board talk of restaurants and travels, so the tags are the name of the cities.

How to understand if tags are good for a site? Checking stats and see if visitors come from tag pages? Is there a tool to check if site.com/tags/.... are well ranked?

Thank you again

You can use analytics to see what traffic to your tag pages is like.

Essentially, they are search results pages and aren't really content pages.

By a fast check on google analytics I sow that visit to tag pages are less then 1%. By checking most visited tag pages, the access via search engine are from keywords that find also other thread, example:
key: restaurant madrid
serp: thread with restaurant xyz - madrid (1st page)
tag with "madrid" (2nd page)
As for I could see, the tags are for my user help, not for drive traffic into the site...

Hi,
I set up maxcdn, and performed a test: WebPagetest - Optimization Check Results
but total score increased "only" from 80/100 to 84/100 . Maybe need other improvement?
Thanks

The CDN will only increase the "use of a cdn" score area.