Asked this in the general area but maybe it would have been smarter here...

My current site is NCAA Football 08 Previews, Message Board and Rosters at ncaaStrategies for NCAA Football 08

The site has been around in one name or another for the past 5 years, but we really want to take it to the next level.

We are considering going with vBSEO as our google ranking has gone from #1 overall to the bottom of page 7 in with our most important keywords with all the changes.

We have all the relevant content and a decent number of sites pointing at us - how much help will vBSEO alone offer?

What else do we need to look at?

Additionally we are not happy with the look of vBadvanced. While we could spend some considerable time tweaking it, we want to know if it is our best option before we invest the time.

How is it for SEO? Is there a better option for posting news content on a homepage? Making RSS feeds available and such?

We are not skilled in graphics and don't have the resources to code an option that would probably allow us to do everything we want to do from the ground up. What kind of options do we have?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

vbseo is a must-have IMO.

On top of that, the one thing i would suggest for you would be to re-code your skin. Most of it is basic stuff that can all be done through the ACP with basic knowledge of xhtml/css.

Move your css to linked files (this is in the ACP options)
validate your code (you have HTML4 elements in an xhtml1 transitional doc type) w3.org will tell you whats wrong and what to fix.
upgrade to 3.6.7. you're a couple bug fixes behind.
be more concise. your title is way to long.

Code:

<title>NCAA Football 08 Previews, Message Board and Rosters at ncaaStrategies - Powered by vBulletin</title>

see also: [HOW-TO] Remove "Powered by vBulletin" from Your Page Titles

I'm not going to go too much in depth here, as its a pre-sale question.

vbseo is a great solution, but its not the be-all end all of SEO.
vbseo provides for 1-link to the content, no duplicate content, search engine friendly url's, and nearly 100 other tweaks and little things here and there that let you move up in the ranks.

but, as the saying goes, you can't polish a turd. lol if your site is horrible, nothing will help you. its PART of the total seo solution, and frankly, its the harder part. The rest is pretty erasy to do

good stuff, I definitely appreciate the reply

we'll finalize our decision making process and be back soon