VBSEO, is it worth it, how easy is it?

[MrEyes]

A rambling take on my experiences with vbSEO (scroll to the end for highlights)

When I started my site I was technically adept and knew that setting up a server/mysql/vbulletin etc was going to be a fairly simple task. However I had little to no experience of the latest SEO best practices, in fact this was something I didn't even consider until the site had been up and running for a few months and I wanted to drive more traffic to the site.

When I first made the decision to start working on increasing traffic I realised that search engines was the key as word of mouth is extremely unreliable and cannot easily be tracked. So I started with my limited "old school" knowledge of using descriptive meta tags, it goes without saying that this yielded no difference whatsoever. After doing a little more research I then discovered the somewhat mysterious world of SEO.

The more I researched SEO the more I realised that there is no one size fits all perfect solution, I also realised that Google etc are extremely tight lipped about what works and what doesn't. This means that when researching SEO I came up against contradictions, mis-information, baseless promises and loads of confusing information and terminology. I also realised that optimising the site was way beyond the time and resources I had available, so I needed to find a solution.

The solution I decided on was vbSEO, the only real reason for choosing them is the "you get what you pay for" mantra and the fact that it was a one solution package. This meant that I was using a paid service (which meant I had some leverage if things went belly up) that did everything from a single mod. Of course you can use multiple free VB mods to achieve the similar things to VBSEO, however I did not want the hassle of managing mods that a year from now might cease to be compatible etc. In addition to this, if you look at the VBSEO site you will see that they have an active & loyal user base and many state that the support they have received is exceptional.

So, I installed vbseo and sat back to see my stats sky rocket.....

They didn't, yes there was an increase but it was hardly noticeable, at this point I thought I had been sold a turkey and the money invested was money wasted. So I did some more research and discovered Sitemaps & Conditional Signatures (free modifications that vbseo offers), I installed this and sat back to see my stats sky rocket.....

They didn't, again there was a slight increase but it was hardly noticeable. Once again I did some more research, made some more tweaks and once again saw slight increases but not the "big bang" I was hoping for.

At this stage I decided that vbseo was a lost cause, and I would just leave it running as is as my members preferred the verbose URLs. The VBSEO configuration was left in this state for almost 6 months, during which time stats were slowly climbing but the climb was no more than the natural climb the site was achieving pre VBSEO (3% month on month increase in Google referrals).

About a month ago and for no particular reason I decided to resurrect my SEO efforts and try to make something of the software I had paid for. I made a few posts to the VBSEO forums and read just about every single piece of advise on their site. Based on their tutorials and advice I then made some fairly major changes to my site and management of it. As an example I now go through all threads and manually add relevant keyword tags to those threads that do not have them, I have implemented a robots file that prevents unnecessary pages from being added to Google, I use the vbSEO relevant replacements feature and much much more. One month on from these changes my Google referrals have jumped by about 120%, so right now I am rather happy with the product.

So in summary, I would recommend vbseo to any vbulletin site owner and the product is worth the investment if you are prepared to put in work yourself.

Highlights

• vbSEO is not and install and forget modification, you will need to tweak and configure it to fit your site.
• Just because something works on another site it doesn't necessarily mean that it will work on yours.
• Everything vbSEO does can be achieved manually or through other mods, but vbSEO brings it all into one single and easily managed modification.
• The changes/tweaks you make do not have immediate effect, it can take up to 3 months to see any real benefits.
• Once you have decided on your SEO strategy, do not change it - frequent changes will adversely impact your rankings as you are effectively starting from square 1.
• From an administrative point of view vbSEO is easy to manage as it is a single product that does everything. Yes the Sitemap and Conditional Signatures mods are separate but they are developed and maintained by the same team so in theory there are no issues with future compatibility.