vBulletin and vBSEO -

Hi Kevin,

Most of our customers' forums (and most forums for that matter) ARE the business. You're in a slightly different approach where you're looking to EXTEND your business via community interaction.

Running a forum is a business decision that should be thought out thoroughly before jumping into it. It can provide a great resource to your customers who need help assembling or have a general question about your product line, etc. The key is to get the content together which will take a great effort on your behalf getting started, all the while not eating your man-hours to run the actual business side of things keeping up with sales, ebay, etc.

An empty forum can be BAD for your business, so if you're going to do it, do it RIGHT.

If you think adding a forum to your store is the right direction, then vBSEO will help you get your posts listed in search engines, which can lead to more product sales, etc. But of course, Content is king. vBSEO can't rank you for threads that do not exist.

Using vbseo, you can also extend it's SEO friendliness to help your cart system too. If you install your forum in root, and set up your current home page as your index.php, and use the forum as forum.php with a CRR (Custom Rewrite Rule) to make it /forums (vbseo uses this exact setup), you can use vBSEO's CRR tool to SEO your cart.

Ie,

Code:

http://esinks.net/cart/y_products.php?productid=774&catid=1&subcatid=8

you can turn into /cart/cat-1/subcat-8/product-774/
for example with NO programming.

You can even add some programming to extend vBSEO to get the titles too if you put in the effort using our extensibility functions to create something like:
/cart/single-sink-vanities/all/36-single-sink-vanity-JYP-0192-T/


If you do decide to use a forum, vb + vbseo is the right choice and we will be here to help you get all set up.






Off topic, I chose that product because you have a critical flaw in your meta tags with items that have quote marks.

Code:

<meta name="keywords" content="36" single sink vanity, sink cabinet, marble countertop, stone countertop, ceramic sink, matching faucet,  JYP-0192-T" />

Effectively, content="36" is all that counts as the quote mark stops it.

You need to parse html special characters in tags to their html entity, ie

Code:

<meta name="keywords" content="36&quot; single sink vanity, sink cabinet, marble countertop, stone countertop, ceramic sink, matching faucet,  JYP-0192-T" />

so that the entire string is counted correctly.

Don't be fooled by marketing. vb4 will come with some seo enhancements, but they are extremely basic and incomplete. Note, vb4 is still in Beta status, and is not recommended to be used in production, even though it is technically 'out'.

We have a feature chart available to compare:
vBSEO - vBulletin 4 + vBSEO 3.5 SEO Features

our 3.5 product will be released following vB4 going Gold (final).

If you TRULY care about the search-engine worthiness of your forum, vBSEO is STILL the correct choice of software to use.