Expert assistance for site conversion enhancement

I'll probably get a ton of emails and I'll try my best to explain what is needed - I have a relatively well established forum that has been running for quite a number of years with over 100,000 posts. I've done a lot of vb work so I know my way around and it's not like I can't easily read a few posts and set up vbseo. What I'm looking for is someone who has run some forums, knows the best way to set up various parts of vb as well for SEO, perhaps some CSS and meta cleanup, and also setup of VBSEO to work within my industry and make sure the transition is fine. What worries me is that I have many posts long indexed in many search engines and I've seen some sites seem to lose traffic, especially initially, and seem to take a very long time to recover with vbseo changing all the urls. Let me know what you can do and your experience. Thanks.

Hello ,

If you are currently using default vBulletin urls ( showthread.php etc.. ) then the transation period will be quicker because vBSEO 301 redirects old urls to new version. If you require professional installation you can order our Installation Service. After installation you can create a critique thread within our vBulletin SEO Discussion - Critique Please at vBSEO.com forum so staff and other members can share their opinions how to improve your on page seo. As you did vBulletin work before i believe you can apply the suggestions pretty easy.

Please let us know if you have any further questions.

Mert - what would professional installation buy me here? I read the description and it seems that if you know your way around vBulletin and LAMP, you're just doing the basic install of VBSEO and it should take no more than 10 minutes. It would seem to be for people who aren't comfortable with doing PHP installations. It would be just as easy for me to do the "install" and then request advice from other members. Personally, I'd rather not put up my forum for display for public critique (and hope it happens) and rather hire someone who knows what he's doing to make these things happen. Thanks for your response though.

From your post, it seems like you need a thorough vBSEO setup. It`s not that hard to get it setup. The tricky part is setting the URL structure, which your site`s future will depend on. There are factors to be taken in consideration, and I guess it goes down to knowing a bit of SEO and configuring vBSEO. There are some presets you can use, but I always liked to get my hands dirty and see what scripts really can do.

Can you explain about 'URL structure' that you refer to? My need really isn't for someone to upload files via FTP, create a database in my cpanel and then click the install directions buttons. I need someone to provide expertise in optimizing my vBulletin site for SEO, top down and in my niche. For extras I might have someone optimize my keywords, meta tags and description, etc. since I did most of it myself understanding SEO but not necessarily being an SEO expert and using all the tools. I'd say I'm "pretty good" but don't have the time to dedicate to getting everything done myself. So much to do, so little time.

Hello ,

vBSEO comes with 6 different url rewrite sets which you can choose from. All these rewrite rule sets are carefully checked via staff during QA ( Quality Assurance ) stage. We suggest everyone to choose from one of the default rewrite settings as customizing rewrite rules needs expertise.

vBSEO default settings are pretty optimized however as i stated in my previous reply , you are welcome to open a Critique Thread so people can share their opinions with you.

@hanky, vBSEO has alot of tools that your site can benefit from, like Rewrite Rules
( RRs ) which are basically generated per page, so you can increase your keyword relevancy simply by using them. You put them like tags in your pages, and you can define what they will be replaced with.
Regarding the URL structure, you have schemas that you can use or define your own, like :

[forum-title]-[forumid].html, or mykeyword-[forum-title]-anotherkeyword-[forumid], heck you can even change the ending. But this needs to be chosen wisely, as once google starts indexing, you don`t want to have your pages recrawled based on a URL structure change over and over. After the first setup, urls are redirected using 301, PR will be passed onto the new keywords, and the rest will be up to google.
Besides all of these, there are alot more things to configure : abreviation, word-replacement ( SEO => Search Engine Optimization for example ) and so on.

And you've just hit the nail on the head for this challenge bin_asc - thanks. This is why for me a "basic installation" of vbseo doesn't really do me much good. I'm very familiar with LAMP and running vb but it's a matter of a little strategy and setup. I contacted one or two people here but they have been either busy and have too much work or there is a responsiveness that I've found somewhat often in the business, so it goes.

I also need to think about forum titles since given the way this works, I may need to create more forums to attract more traffic based upon the separation.

There are some competitors running vbseo so it might be useful to watch them and see what they've done as well. Thanks for your reply and hopefully we'll get this resolved soon.

Anytime. Good luck with your configurations. Haller if you need help

Thanks man. I may just call on you. As I said, I need assistance in setting up our forums and site to include the right keywords (I'm not just talking meta) which will also include the setup of related forums using better search terms, etc. for example if you're using a medical forum you want to use doctors, not physicians as a term for a forum name due to searching, etc. I prefer to use someone who has done this well before as our site is growing quite quickly. Glad to have anyone who provides these services to write and inquire. We'll need to finish SEO on the site as well, clean up a little css, etc. Thanks.