Do I need this?

We are a very new vBuleltin board with about 200 members. We currently use vBadvanced and VB 3.6.0.

We are a non-profit local chit-chit board. We don't sell or market anything. We offer area political discusions and historical discussions about our famous city. We would like to attract members and guests from search engines doing a search for the term "Dodge City".

Currently, we are ranked very poorly on page 113 or so on Google. Much better by Yahoo and MSN. We have only one member that said they found us on Google. I have ran the vbseo test script and everything came out good. We use HostGator (SwampCroc level).

My questions:

Would we benefit from SEO? $149 is kind of steep for us.
Would it be worth it for a non-commercial community chat site?
Would it interfere with any of our hacks (we have a bunch)?
Would it still function if/when updates for vBulletin are applied in the future?
Would we have to reapply it on each vBulletin upgrade?
Is it easy to use, Install and configure for a non-seo savvy admin?
Does it increase bandwidth usage by spiders?
Does it work well with vBadvanced?

We had previously installed a (free) seo hack that kind of screwed things up in the Who's Online. It showed many users at "Unknown Location". There were also incidents where the absolute home directory was being revealed (on Who's Online) when the spiders would crawl some of the hacks, external pages, and even some threads. Does this happen with vBseo?

We see lots of spiders on all the time, but notice they try and crawl pages with "no permission" in Who's online. Would this fix that?

Thanks for answering my questions. I will watch patiently for answers.

Board: DodgeBoard.Com

- Yes, you will definitely benefit from having your forum vBSEO-enabled. Any vBulletin powered forum that wants more traffic will benefit!

- As long as you see value in having more traffic to your website, vBSEO is a worthwhile investment. Remember, value doesn't have to be in monetary terms. If you've set-up a non-profit, non-commercial forum that doesn't make any money, I'm sure that you still consider it successful when it attracts new visitors, new members, new posters, and promotes the exchange of information about your topic.

- vBSEO is non-intrusive. It should not impact any other hack you have installed. Of course, there have been rare cases of incompatibilities that are typically fixed by our team for the next release.

- We maintain compatibility with all versions of vBulletin.

- You will need to upgrade vBSEO for compatibility. The good news is that an installation is typically completed in under 5 minutes. In fact, some of our veterans claim they can do it in about 30 seconds.

- Very easy to use, especially since our default installation is often all you need. Even if you do plan to make changes, a 1-time configuration is advised for your content relevant URLs (CRUs) and most features.

- One *fortunate* side effect of vBSEO is that is does cause more spider activity on your site, and therefore more bandwidth consumption. This is a good thing! It means that your content will be indexed and eligible to start receiving web traffic. On the flip side, vBSEO reduces bandwidth consumption by stripping unnecessary comment tags in real time AND saves tremendous bandwidth by preventing spiders from crawling 1,000s of duplicate pages and noise content, etc.

- vBSEO and vBAdvanced work very well together. Hundreds of our customers have vBSEO + vBA installed without issue.

- vBSEO is a professional SEO solution. You will not see the types of typical errors that occur with the various free SEO hacks that are available. In fact, we believe only 2 of 6 are still being actively developed. For maximum reliability and SEO powerhouse performance, trust your forum to vSBEO only.

- A technique of using something called "rel=nofollow" will prevent Google and other SEs from crawling pages that it shouldn't (aka noise or garbage content).

I hope that helps.

Thanks Joe! Purchased via Paypal and sent PM. Awaiting script.

Appreciate you answering my questions so fast!

Welcome aboard.