SEO

What is it and how does it work?

vBSEO is a search engine optimization plugin that installs within an existing vBulletin forum. It changes the characteristics of the forum in order to optimize it for search engines, with the ultimate goal of getting more search engine traffic. More info on benefits here:

http://www.vbseo.com/purchase/

vBSEO is a full SEO solution with many different features. One common feature is the rewriting of URLs, changing from their dynamic formats (showthread.php, etc.) to keyword rich CRUs such as:

To check out some of the many features, please try our demo:
http://www.vbseo.com/demo/

If you have any questions about a particular feature, please post them here.

BTW, a default installation of vBSEO is a great way to get started. You do not need to have expert knowledge of SEO in order to use vBSEO. Just install it in approximately 5 minutes and it takes care of the rest.

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Joe Ward / Crawlability Inc.
Support Team Launches New DeskPro Powered Tool Enhanced Support at Your Service

vBSEO 3.2.0 Launched - Maximum Overdrive for Your Web Traffic! Over 100 Instant SEO Optimizations

6X Traffic - $1400 in One Day with vBSEO! Imagine What the vBSEO Patent Pending Technology Can Do For You.

Thanks for your reply.
A few more...
Who should use vBSEO?
And are there any other (free) alternatives?
If so, how does vBSEO compares to them?

Everyone running a vBulletin powered forum who wants more traffic from search engines should use vBSEO. If you are running a forum, regardless of whether you run it as a business, not-for-profit, or hobby, more Web visitors should be your fundamental goal for your community - and vBSEO is the solution that can help to make that a reality.

vBSEO is the only professionally developed, full featured, rapidly updated, fully supported SEO solution for vBulletin. No alternative exists that rivals the depth of our feature set, high quality standards, and responsive customer support.

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Joe Ward / Crawlability Inc.
Support Team Launches New DeskPro Powered Tool Enhanced Support at Your Service

vBSEO 3.2.0 Launched - Maximum Overdrive for Your Web Traffic! Over 100 Instant SEO Optimizations

6X Traffic - $1400 in One Day with vBSEO! Imagine What the vBSEO Patent Pending Technology Can Do For You.

Joe's right.

There's one program out there that's free, that does perform a similar function, but:

a) it doesn't do anywhere near as good of a job
b) it doesn't have nearly as many features
c) it's not nearly as well maintained
d) it has virtually no support, certainly not the quick, professional response you receive here
e) it's riddled with bugs

When it comes to optimizing your site, you have to ask yourself.. Do you want something that's going to work, that's feature rich, that has support available, and a community of people on here who are willing to help out as much as they can...

or...

Do you want something free, that barely ever works, that will break your site and cause massive problems for your users.

When it comes to the success of your site, don't settle for an alternative.

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The Liberty Lounge Political Forums - Our political forums, your two cents.

Is mod_rewrite really necessary?
And what if I have a lot of SERPS currently, will I loose those?

mod_rewrite is just the technology that allows conversion of dynamic URLs to static equivalents.

CRUs (Content Relevant URLs) can provide SEO advantages because of the embedded keywords that may help to boost the relevancy of the page.

However, achieving URL consistency (1-URL-per Resource) is fundamental - and we consider it absolutely necessary for any forum striving to achieve the best possible search engine optimization scenario.

With vBulletin, some of your existing pages that are indexed will be removed. This is a good thing, as vBSEO transforms your forum into a 1-URL-per-resource, consistent hierarchical structure.

However, our 301 redirect system is what allows your SERPs to be maintained by allowing the search engines to be informed of which of your new pages are replacements for the old dynamic versions.

Running our free vBSEO Google/Yahoo Sitemap generator is also encouraged so that both Yahoo and Google are provided with a complete list of your new pages that are waiting to be indexed.

__________________
Joe Ward / Crawlability Inc.
Support Team Launches New DeskPro Powered Tool Enhanced Support at Your Service

vBSEO 3.2.0 Launched - Maximum Overdrive for Your Web Traffic! Over 100 Instant SEO Optimizations

6X Traffic - $1400 in One Day with vBSEO! Imagine What the vBSEO Patent Pending Technology Can Do For You.

What if I have a low homepage PR, will vBSEO still work for me?
Will vBSEO bring me more traffic?
Will vBSEO affect my board's performance?

Page rank deals with linking. vBSEO helps in this regard as it takes ALL the possible URLS (all the showtopic.php?t=xxxx and for each post, showtopic.php?p=yyyy) and makes them 1 URL, instead of 20-ish, thus making each link count "more".
But, the end result is that vbseo can't get your links to other sites... that's something you need to do on your own. Joe hints at this above in the "1-URL-per Resource" statement.

vBSEO will bring you more traffic. I trippled mine. Proof in my sig.

vBSEO does eat a little bit of server resources and does increase load-- but not much. Basically, if your server isn't in the red zone now in terms of cpu, ram, or load, you will be fine.

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My Blog | the Ultimate Guide to vBSEO

Who should I host with?

vBSEO will help increase PageRank for all of your pages because of the URL consistency. Boosted PR has been linked to increased crawling priority for the search engines. However, you should proactively attempt to build inbound links to your site to further improve SEO.

Part of the vBSEO solution's aim is to get more of your unique pages indexed, with higher relevancy for the terms on a page by page basis. When this occurs, you will achieve more traffic.

Performance should not be an issue. However, if you have a forum that is already performing poorly (i.e. overloaded), you will likely notice an impact by installing vBSEO. Many highly active forums run vBSEO without any significant performance impact.

Is your forum highly active? How is your current performance?

__________________
Joe Ward / Crawlability Inc.
Support Team Launches New DeskPro Powered Tool Enhanced Support at Your Service

vBSEO 3.2.0 Launched - Maximum Overdrive for Your Web Traffic! Over 100 Instant SEO Optimizations

6X Traffic - $1400 in One Day with vBSEO! Imagine What the vBSEO Patent Pending Technology Can Do For You.

Will vBSEO affect my board's performance?
Can vBSEO screw my SEO?
How do I know what settings are the best?
Will the settings be the same for highly active forums as for the ones that are not as active?

1) Depends on the power of the computer your website is being hosted on, IMO. As long as it's decently "up to date", you shouldn't see much of a hit in performance.

Using a PHP cache such as Zend + eAccelerator have allowed me to run vbSEO with 0 performance hit.

2) Not sure what you mean by "screw", but although you might see a temporary decrease in number of pages indexed on search engines due to URL changes while they update their index, ultimately those pages will rank higher and there'll be more of them.

3) It really depends on what you want, IMO. People on the boards are willing to help out and the support is fast and can make reccomendations and tell what vbSEO.com uses

4) Not sure on that one, I don't see why they wouldn't be though. You might want to ping google less, update sitemap less, etc, for a slower site.. but as far as URL rewrite settings, shouldn't make a difference I'd think.