Progress Report for a new site November 3,2008.

I am a little skeptical of vbseo but I have heard great reviews outside of this site. I decided to suck it up and fork over the $150 I could have used to purchase clothes and food. I was using zoints but I guess I really wanted to fully optimize my website.

I started my forum a little over 2 weeks ago. I installed vbseo today and like others before me, I will update this thread once a week so people will know if the vbseo script for vbulletin is worth it or not.


The forum I will be using vbseo on is...
Personality Cafe - The Place To Discover Yourself


Start:
Indexed Pages
Google: 231
Yahoo: 171 Yahoo Links: 274
MSN/Live.com: 1

Forum Stats
Threads: 241, Posts: 2,412, Members: 139

I'm glad you made the decision to choose vBSEO. You now strongly boosted your chances of success.

I would recommend that you also keep track of your long tail stats:
Measuring Your Long Tail - vBulletin SEO Forums

Here are some helpful resources that can give help you get further optimized:
Your Site Review - Stuff to Do First

Briansol's Ultimate Guide to vBSEO

Ok, I decided to this monthly because it is more efficient for both you and I. BTW ITS MY BIRTHDAY TODAY.

Anyways, here are my stats on December 3, 2008... I am very surprised by the results. Bots are now crawling my site constantly and my indexed pages have increased! What people don't understand about vbseo is that it doesn't just rewrite urls but fully optimizes every page to make it more indexable in search engines. It also directs bots on what to index so if you guys can afford $150 go for it. You can do this yourself but it takes a lot of coding and time which I don't have time for.


Start:

Indexed Pages
Google: 3,040 [It went up by almost 3000 pages indexed!!]
Yahoo: 514 Yahoo Links:1,423 [Yahoo is up as well!]
MSN/Live.com: 7 lol. Up by 6! [Woot go msn! XD]


I have very active members in my forum so my forum stats may surprise you...
Forum Stats
Threads: 603, Posts: 13,493, Members: 296

Post has increased almost 6x!


Here are some screenshots. As you can see traffic has been rising slowly but surely. My server actually crashed due to the high load I am receiving.

Happy Birthday.

By the way, after 3 years of near constant coding and updating, I would say noone should ever try to do something like this themselves!

But you don't have too, because you can get the equivalent of 3+ years of coding by a professional team, with ongoing support and updates, for the cost of 1 vBSEO license. Now that is a great deal!

Originally Posted by profanitytalker

You can do this yourself but it takes a lot of coding and time which I don't have time for.

Btw I have a very bad long tail because I have a strong brand name.

You mean you get a lot of traffic to your brand name?

How many keywords are you getting traffic for?

2874 total visits via 379 words.

You should get rid of your homepage, which just has the enter button and move the forumhome page up to root. You can still keep the rest of the forum running in /forum/. Please open a support ticket to get help from the team on this.

How does this affect search engine results? As you can see my bounce rate is very low due to the fact that I have a front page but should I just do it vbadvanced cmp style?

You have a really nice graphic in your welcome header here:
PersonalityCafe - The Place To Discover Yourself

Your current homepage takes all of your other links one-step-deeper into your hierarchy and there is no actual text on the page.

I would just get this page configured to run as your homepage. You could redirect /forum/ (by itself) back to root.

I decided to take your advice. Can you see if this is how I should do my forum? I might add vbadvance.

I like it. You should try increasing the line spacing in your welcome header text.

You should also try to place more interesting article content on the homepage instead of the moderator nominations and forum rules, etc.

oh yes. I am not done yet but thanks! At least I know I am doing something right!

Stats for December 3, 2008-January 3 2009

Indexed Pages
Google: 5,060 [It went up by almost about 2000+ indexed pages]
Yahoo: 633 Yahoo Links:1,756 [Yahoo is up as well]
MSN/Live.com: 7 [No Change]


Forum Stats
Threads: 824, Posts: 20,219, Members: 386


Vistors
Traffic: 11,593 visitors
Search Engine Sent: 4011 total visits via 893 keywords

Traffic is up 40% from last month and search engine increase by 1100+ visitors. Keywords sent have tripled! I think vbseo is starting to work.

It sounds like your long tail is growing with help from vBSEO!