I know there are things like Zoints and VBseo for vbulletin, but what if you don't use anything like that? Are you doomed for ranking well in search engines?
Digital Point doesn't use an mods and this forum ranks very well. All you need to make sure is that you exclude any "noise" pages from being indexed in the search engines using robots.txt http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/how-to-stop-vbulletin-ruining-your-website
I believe having title keywords in the url is very important. Other factors can be ignored but i think the one i said is the most important one and should not be ignored.
"Can you be successful without SEO?" is a common question. With great sites like DigitalPoint doing very well, it's clear that it is possible. One way is to rely on paid advertising such as AdWords, purchasing sponsorships, paid ad in ezines, paid email blasts, etc. to deliver traffic. What you will find with time is that there is no better source of traffic than Web visitors delivered from organic search engine listings. What is organic? Organic simply means non-paid search engine results for your search. There are 2 big reasons for it being such a great source of traffic: Cost effectiveness: Successful search engine positioning is going to deliver thousands of targetted hits that would be very expensive to achieve with any of the aforementioned paid techniques. Experiment with AdWords to see how quickly a budget can be burned, perhaps without the results you expected. Word of Mouth Authority: Organic search engine result have more credibility than paid ads. Because they are unpaid, visitors see them as having a higher likelihood of containing the info they seek. They recognize paid ads as the message the business owner wants you to have - which may quite often be biased. Get listed for related terms, and your clickthrough will be better than for paid advertising due to increased credibility. But the best part is that this traffic is free. I think the better question is "Why would someone NOT use SEO given its known advantages?". The only answer I can think of is when there is no SEO solution available. This is not the case with vBulletin. Thousands of users have discovered vBSEO and are seeing results from small traffic increases to the major success stories given in my signature link. If you're doing everything right and have chosen a forum niche that has the potential to grow to something like DigitalPoint, put every factor into play. Don't neglect a known positive factor to every webmaster: SEO! Take advantage of its cost effective (free vs. paid), high authority traffic. Accelerate your growth. Don't miss out.
You don't neccessarly need vBSEO or Zoints to have a great forum. It won't hurt to use Zoints because its free and it's not worth it to use vBSEO because of the cost.