Is vBSEO a useful tool for a brand new site?

Hi There,

I am very interested in the product after reading so many reviews and being recommended by a friend.

I am a web designer and very much appreciate the need for a good SEO stratagey for a site to become successful.

I have recently launched a vb forum aimed at the UK hosting market, I have had the site running for a mere 3 days, and with only 4 members to talk of so far I am considering my options to boost signups.

My question is, is vBSEO going to provide good results for a new site which has only just started, or would it be better working on getting people joining myself, and then investing in vBSEO later down the line?

Also, I have heard the configuration of the product is quite complex, and that I should even prepare a configuration before installing, is there anywhere I can find out more regarding this?

Any Help is much appreciated!

Seasons Greetings,
- Fred.

We definitely recommend you install vBSEO as early as possible. That is the preferred scenario.

Now - you should not expect a huge influx of traffic immediately, as you will need to generate content for traffic to be harnessed. However, having vBSEO from the beginning ensures that new content is optimized from its inception.

As long as you are committed to building your forum, vBSEO will help accelerate your success.

Note: If you install vBSEO later in your forum's life, it will force the search engines to update all of the content they already have in their index. While, we do provide a 301 mechanism for this, the preferred scenario will always be to skip this update process by having vBSEO installed from the beginning.

Thanks for the repsonse Joe,

You'll be pleased to know that I know have vBSEO up and running, I had been noticing googlebot was listed as a guest quite a lot over the last few days - will it matter much that it was crawling before I installed vBSEO?

Thanks again,
Freddy

Hi Freddy,

Since your forum is new, GoogleBot can quickly update any of the content that is discovered prior to you installing vBSEO.

Had you been online for a long time, with thousands of threads created, it would have been more time consuming for this update to fully occur via our 301s.

So - even though you probably only have a small amount of pages already indexed, our 301 redirection mechanism is still at work for you now.

Remember to install our sitemap as well, if you haven't already.

Hi Joe,

I have just installed the sitemap mod, however I am a little unsure how it all works.

I have completed the install instructions fine, and can see that there is a scheduled task setup to create sitemaps.

Do I need to manually upload these to google from my webmasters account?

Also, when using vbseo, should I keep a simple robots.txt file in the root as I normally would, to stop crawlers indexing my image directories etc?

I am also aware that there is a sitemap command to use in robots.txt files to specify the location of a sitemap, should I worry about this?

Thanks again!

Freddy