After over a year of considering the purchase of vBulletin SEO for PokerForums.org, I finally bought and installed it two days ago.

vBulletin SEO is a 3rd-party plugin for the forum software vBulletin which greatly improves the forum's visibility by optimizing the forum for search engines (Search Engine Optimization).

Before making my decision, I bought two copies of vBulletin SEO and ran them on two of my other forums as case studies. It's still too early to obtain a conclusion from them, but so far the vBulletin SEO plugin has increased their search-engine traffic pretty considerably. (Read vBSEO Case Study "B" Commencement » TylerCruz.com: An Internet Entrepreneur’s Journey and
vBSEO Case Study 2-Month Update » TylerCruz.com: An Internet Entrepreneur’s Journey if you're interested in the numbers and calculations).

vBulletin SEO is now running on our forum, and is a very powerful application. Unfortunately for you guys, you shouldn't notice anything different other than the following, since it's really the search-engines that now view the site differently (and easier). The changes that you will notice are:

1. The "Search Engine Optimization by vBulletin SEO 3.0.0 ©2007, Crawlability, Inc." at the bottom of the site (Haha, who actually noticed that, and if you did, shame on you).

2. The index/front page is now always the URL: http://www.pokerforums.org. It is no longer sometimes http://www.pokerforums.org/ or http://www.pokerforums.org/index.php?

3. But the main change you'll notice is that the URLs are now a lot friendlier.

Here are two old URLS:

Code:

PokerStars AutoReload 
http://www.pokerforums.org/online-poker-room-discussion/

And their new search-engine friendly and human-readable URLs:

Code:

PokerStars AutoReload
http://www.pokerforums.org/online-po...om-discussion/

In addition, I also installed the a Google/Yahoo Sitemap plugin, which creates a very search-engine friendly Sitemap for search engine spiders to use and index.

So what does all of this mean for you guys? Well, apart from now seeing friendlier URLs, you won't directly see any differences. However, PokerForums.org should hopefully now benefit from a much better search-engine presence, hopefully bringing in a lot of new traffic and members.

I'm logging the effects and data of the vBulletin SEO plugin for an ongoing case study on my blog, and will let you guys know if PFO sees a great increase as as a result.

Edit:

Interesting: Another thing I guess vBulletin SEO does is automatically grab the title from the URL you're linking to and use that as the anchor text, which is why my two examples above won't make sense now.