My vBSEO Progress Report

March 2008

• The last month I ran my forum before installing vBSEO
• Used digg and Feedburner for traffic source as well
• Used Myspace of 20K friends for traffic as well

April 2008

• Installed vbSEO 1st week of April
• Traffic Dropped: Made lots of mistakes during installation!!
• Still digging and Using feedburner for extra traffic

May 2008

• Traffic started picking up again
• Live.com Traffic started Increasing
• Still using digg and Feedburner for extra traffic

June 2008

• Made big changes in my forum and lost traffic with google
• Live.com traffic still increasing
• Used myspace and feedburner for extra traffic

July 2008

• Almost back to my Google.com Search Engine stats before installing vBSEO. Now looking forward on passing it.
• Focused more On Search Engine Traffic (Better For Adsense) stopped digging almost all posts, reduced traffic with feedburner and myspace.

Long Tail Search For The Last 30 Days: Search sent 22,119 total visits via 11,806 keywords

The Attachment below is my Search Engine traffic since I setup Google Analytics on my site on April 15th to August 14th

Glad to see that you are on the path to significant traffic growth. Sorry to hear that you experienced a few hiccups on the way.

Do you have any tips for new vBSEO installers? Anything specific to do or avoid?

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

Glad to see that you are not on the path to significant traffic growth. Sorry to hear that you experienced a few hiccups on the way.

Do you have any tips for new vBSEO installers? Anything specific to do or avoid?

Is that a typo in your quote?

Yes I have tips to share with vBSEO installers and Joe please correct me if am wrong

Make sure you do these first: stuff to do first

Remove "Powered by vBulletin" from Your Page Titles
I believe this will help you archive better results in SERPs

When you re-write you urls make sure you include the old ones till google indexes the new ones - I failed to do this.



Google webmaster is also a very useful tool which is highly recommended for all vBSEO customers
Google Webmaster Tools - Recommended for All vBSEO Customers

With G.W you will find errors that google spiders spot on your site, make sure you attend to them quickly. The lower your errors the more google loves your site.

SEO is not the only element to get your forum started but its an important factor in other to make sure you have lots traffic coming in. Which is why I highly recommend vBSEO for all vbulletin users. They are other important things you need in other to make sure you get your forum going, like:

Getting Started
Discussions about Planning an Online Community - Privacy Policies - Terms of Service - Targeting Niche - Demographics.

Managing an Online Community


Members & Staff
Managing Members and Staff - Building Community Spirit.

They are lots of tip in the above links that will help you manage your forum better and get it started


Make sure you set long term goals while experimenting with your forum. 1, 2, or even 3 months time periods to make your tests. To my knowledge search engines don't adjust to changes so quick.

Keep track of the changes you make on your forum.

Remember Content Is King, if your forum not so active I recommend this links The best tips to get your forum started

You might need to create several accounts and start creating contents yourself. This will help make your forum look active (for people) and also help you with content indexing (for search engines)

The importance of Content

The more content you have with the right SEO the more traffic you will get.

Finally threat your forum like its a project that your are managing (Project Management)

Your the project manager

Then you have vBSEO and other tools you have to help you as your practitioners

Then u have your customer they are your targeted audience

The end users which are your members.

All these have to be jelled to have a successful community.

So here are some useful community management resources

My forum is still growing and has a long way to go and I hope it becomes successful soon. Sometimes I get tired of working on it cuz its such a slow process and its taking longer than I expected to achieve greater results. Hopefully Joe and others can give me some tips on what I can do to speed up the process and achieve greater results.


I hope this helps new vBSEO installers

Thanks for the great post.

I fixed my typo.