VbSEO and your forums: Part 1 Posted December 12th, 2005 in Forum SEO, Guest Contributors

As many forum admins know the search engines can easily make or break your site. And believe me I have tried just about everything under the sun to have what I think is a well optimized page without going overboard. So along comes this product called VbSEO (http://www.vbseo.com). Now I have seen other like products come along such as Daniweb’s rewrite tutorial but for those of us who are not confident in our coding knowledge these other products can pose somewhat of a challenge.

So I buckled down, broke the bank, and purchase VbSEO for $160. And I did this for 2 main reasons. Number 1 is like CRUs (content relevant URLs) and I don’t think to many people will complain with that. For example you might have a page that looks like this:

http://www.yoursite.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=22

but you could have that page look like this:

http://www.yoursite.com/forums/specific-forum/

And having just that to me is well worth the price, not only for search engines but it’s a lot easier for members to cut and paste and remember. The second reason I purchased this product it for testing. My forum mainly runs off of viral marketing and not a whole lot of search engine traffic so I figured it couldn’t hurt me if it went downhill. And if it did me some good then I would be even more pleased.

Now there are many more features that VbSEO can do but I won’t even go into that yet as Part 1 of my findings. Without further ado here are some hard numbers for the first month.

11-7-05 Index’d Page Numbers (First Day of Installation)

~ 240,000 via google
~ 10,500 via yahoo
~ 600 via MSN

12-12-05

~ 40,500 via google
~ 9,990 via yahoo
~ 1,556 via MSN

*Archive was dropped during this period.

10-1-05 to 10-31-05 Search Engine Phrases via Awstats

1,796 phrases
11-1-05 to 11-30-05 Search Engine Phrases via Awstats

1,425 phrases

Those are the findings for the first month. Take them how you want and I will report back with the second month findings in the Part 2.

By Rex with CruiseLineForums.Com