Please explain

A friend has suggested I use vBSEO. All I really want to know is will it bring me more members?

vBSEO will help get your content indexed well in the search engines, which will increase the chances of people finding your site. vBSEO cannot, however, force users to search for the keywords/content that your site contains.

So, even if you have a well indexed site, if the subject matter isn't what people are searching for, it's probably not going to help you get more members.

vBSEO cannot, however, force users to search for the keywords/content that your site contains.

Thank you, but I think I am aware of this.

Hi Marge,

Basically Keith was trying to point out that the amount of traffic you get will ultimately depend on the content of your forum.

• A very popular topic will be searched for alot, but will have strong competition from other websites providing similar content.
• A very specific small topic will be searched for less often, but *may* have less competition from other websites.

The most successful websites will be those who have a balance between the two. That is, identifying a particular niche that has a high level of interest (or projected to have a high level of interest in the near future), but is still new enough (or unnoticed enough) to have relatively weak competition.

One example was the Nintendo Wii. Far prior to the release of the system, we had several customers build new forums based on the game system and individual game titles. They knew that this would become a hot search item upon it's release. They wanted to get their content online and optimized to get a jump start on their competition.

This is a particularly relevant topic for those considering starting a new forum.

However - for *any* forum, applying accepted search engine optimization strategies will help deliver more relevant web traffic to your site. For a forum, that equates to more new members.

A friend has suggested I use vBSEO. All I really want to know is will it bring me more members?

Your question was a bit simpler than all that. You just wanted to know if vBSEO will deliver new members.

While results vary from forum to forum (as above), here is how vBSEO will help you get new members.

vBSEO's ultimate goal is to help deliver more Web traffic to your forum.

This is done in two ways:

1. We help get more of your content indexed. More indexed, means more that can potentially deliver traffic.
2. We help to get ALL of your content optimized for better rankings. So, once it is indexed, it will be in a position to help get ranked better (or higher up) in the search engines.

Part of the result of optimizing your pages to make them more relevant to the actual content of the page is that your visitors are more highly targeted to your site.

And the very welcome benefit of highly targeted visitors is:

• They're going to stay on your site! Because they've found what they want. User's who find what they want at your site, just might signup and become members.
• Your ad revenue gets a boost. Users who arrive on your page, but don't find what they are looking for, are not likely to click ads related to content they're NOT looking for. On the contrary relevant users arriving at relevant content with relevant ads equals more clickthroughs and more ad revenue. This is why it's not uncommon to discover success stories such as this.

She bought it, I installed if for her. I have it on my sites, and I can't complain!

Just keep the content going on your forum Sweetpea!