[Lizard King]

Forums are made from threads and if you really know how to SEO your board you have a really succesful weapon in your hand. For example you can easily disable indexing your showpost pages which will create 99% duplicate content. Also you can disable some of your chit chat forums and focus on the real content of your board. You can manually do lots of template edits and remove unnecessary url's from guest eyes which will higher your rankings , you can use a header structure for your site and get better keyword density and if you merge all these with a good seo product then you will have a perfectly seo optimized board. How can this help ? Get number 1 spot in google rankings in 2 days after thread creation within 2-3 million results. So yes SEO optimization is really important.

Let me try to give an example when you validate this page and check show outline option the result you get is :

h1 - The Official vBulletin Modifications Site.

h2 -    * Forum SEO - Does it really matter?

Because the style is edited , however it is not edited well enough from my point of view.

If you check a default vBulletin page you can't see any header structure which really sucks.

However if you check a thread on good optimized board the result you get is

h1 - Site Name

h2 -   * keyword
h3 -          o keyword
h4 -                + Rply: keyword

As you can see i have the same keyword repated in header tags + you can also have the keyword in your url and it will increase your rankings. I have this on my board if you want you can easily check thread and see.Thats why vBSEO is a really good program. It nearly does 60% of the job but if you have the knowledge and complete the reaminng 40% then you'll also have a perfectly seo optimized board.