I'm lost in the jungle of plugins!

[JeansJoe]

Hey there!
I am currently installing my forum - and I have figured out quite some stuff...
but now I am pretty much lost and everything I search leads me to the same pages over and over again. Maybe you guys can help me a bit.

I installed the newest version of vb 3.8.4 and vbseo 1 (the free one from these forums) vbexperience and vbshout. So far these work great!

What I need now:

• to know wether SEO stuff is bad for me. Do search engines like Google push my rank down because I use a SEO-theme? I know there are some bad SEO techniques that google now fights.
• is rewriting my urls bad? and if no - which free plugin can make my urls like: www.forumname.com/forumtitle/threadtitle/ or similar. (should be compatible wit 3.8.4) (seriously I searched this more often than ravens can say nevermore)
• blogs... I know there is a blogfeature for vb. Does that cost something? Is there a free version? I found an official blog addon page but no purchase/download page?!
  I am either looking for a vb internal blog feature - a blog feature with one copy of wordpress - or a blogfeature that implements user blogs into one or multiple wordpress installation.
• your brains. Just put them in a box and send them over. I need them to fight off the zombies in my garden.
  Seriously... What's your experience with the plugins I use and do you have any other plugins that you would say are absoluuutely necessary for a vb forum.

Thank you very very very much. If you should answer maybe I'm just doing a "SEARCH MORE DONT POST"-thread. But seriously... I have easily been searching for 5 hours now.

Cheers!

[kevcj]

For one thing - and this is important - there are dozens, if not hundreds of factors that determine "where" your site ranks in the search engines. Long tail keywords are just one small pixel in a big picture.

The last time I read through the google webmaster guidelines, it recommended against rewriting your urls. Some people says it helps, some people says it dont, I personally think it helps a little.

Besides rewriting the urls, there are other things that affects your rankings - such as the meta description, site title, duplicate content, links from spam sites, age of the site, out bound links to spam sites,,,,, literally dozens of factors.

Dont get so focused on one little pixel of the big picture that you ignore everything else.