Should I wait to purchase?

Hello everyone,

Been browsing the forum for awhile -- finally decided to register and get involved.

My forum is very new and is slowly growing still (only about 380 members and ~2000 posts). Its located at Med Studentz Medical Forums

This is the number of pages we have indexed so far without doing any SEO or anything really:

Yahoo: 273
Google: 1510
MSN: 282
AltaVista: 350

Now I know that vBSEO does a lot more stuff than simply increasing # of indexed pages but I want to know what kind of increase would I experience with vBSEO with all other variables staying constant (or as close to the same thing I have on my site right now) in terms of # of indexed pages.

Is my forum currently too small for vBSEO to have any significant contribution? Should I wait to purchase it? I know you guys recommend that the sooner you use it the better because then you don't have a drop in # of indexed pages while vBSEO works but in my case I don't think that would be a problem since the # of pages indexed is already quite low.

Also, if I only have about 2000 posts is 1510 pages indexed by Google a good number or is it not very accurate due to other pages (ie Contact Us, FAQ, etc) being included in that index as well?

Sorry for the essay -- Thanks a lot!

No matter what, you WILL lose indexed pages.

But, you WANT that to happen.

vBSEO uses 1 url per topic page, instead of all the many various possibilities:
- ?t=123
- ?p=456
- ?p=457
- ?p=458
etc etc...

Search engines and users are prevented from finding duplicate content by ensuring that links to the various vBulletin areas point to the same static pages wherever they occur, including:

• Forumjump landing pages
• Landing pages (and post anchors) after posting new threads or posts
• Landing pages (and post anchors) for 'Last Post by', 'Latest Post' and 'Newest Post' in threads
• Landing pages for 'previous' & 'next' threads
• Landing pages for 'Go To Page' forms
• Search Results

I went from over a MILLION urls to 140,000 via a site: command query, yet my traffic trippled.

quality > quantity.

Rehan,

You should not wait. It is best to have vBSEO installed as early as possible. Then you can focus on moving forward with your other activities to generate more content.

Thank you for the response Briansol -- that does help a little but I don't understand why losing # of indexed pages correlates with the quality > quantity approach. Wouldn't the best solution be to have more indexed pages due to vBSEO's work? I realize there's a temporary dip in # of index pages but from what I've read that then surpasses the original # of pre-vBSEO indexed pages. Am I wrong about this?

Joe Ward -- I found your response to be more sales than anything really in response to my question. Specifically in terms of me asking:

I want to know what kind of increase would I experience with vBSEO with all other variables staying constant (or as close to the same thing I have on my site right now) in terms of # of indexed pages.

Can you please respond with what you believe your product can specifically do for my site taking into consideration the # of indexed pages I already have and my site's size.

As much as I know you're on the "buy as soon as possible" line, I doubt that all customers receive the same utility on their purchase irrespective of the size of their forum. If I'd get the same results from buying right now that I would buying 6 months from now, I'd rather wait 6 months from now to spend $150.

Thanks!

There is no way to know for sure how your site will do. The point is, you should be setting your site up for best SEO from the beginning, so now is better than later.

Your number of indexed pages should go down in most cases, since vBSEO creates a single URL for each bit of content, instead of lots of duplicates URLs that point to the same content (default vBulletin).

But will I definitely get more of the following?

1. Traffic
2. Profit
3. Posting
4. Members
5. Growth

Thats what the purchase page claims that buying your product will do for my site so I'm curious as to whether those are things that have been proven or they're claims that you would love for vBSEO to do to your customers' sites.

Could you justify those claims with any sort of research?

Thanks!

SEO is done with the goal of achieving more web traffic. With increased traffic, more highly targeted to your content, you can definitely expect to see greater participation (including posting and new member registrations), as well as a revenue boost from the sales generated by either ad content or the sale of your goods/services. Increased activity also enables you to charge larger premiums for sponsored advertisers, etc.

In the forum world, increased traffic has a compounding effect. That is, your new traffic generates new content which is also automatically search engine optimized by vBSEO in real time. The new content may then generate more hits for your forum, accelerating your growth over time.

vBSEO will apply several SEO techniques to your site in order to help you achieve increased traffic from all search engines.

Results may vary as each site has its own set of characteristics that can impact how it is evaluated in the search engines crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms. With vBSEO you can expect your site to be optimized on a forum-by-forum, thread-by-thread basis, enabling you to gain traffic from thousands of different search terms.

Please rest assured, that vBSEO has consistently been successful in helping our customers achieve their SEO goals.

I recommend you check out our reviews forum to get a sense of what a typical vBSEO experience is like.

Originally Posted by Rehan

But will I definitely get more of the following?

1. Traffic
2. Profit
3. Posting
4. Members
5. Growth

from my personal experience, yes.

i installed vbseo on june 16th.

traffic: Honda Swap - http://hondaswap.com/

profit went from 15-20/day to 75-100/day with a record best day of $166 just from adsense (not counting my cpm ads, etc)
$300 months have made way to $2500+ months

posting, members, and growth have also continued upwards.

since june, i've bought 3 more licenses for my other small sites... and one of my sites with 8 members and 100 posts out-ranks some of the major sites out there for common queries. I haven't put much time into them to properly market them yet, hence why they are still small... but within a year, i'll be tearing up the SE's and have loads of content, and will be retiring at the age of 27