What exactly does vbseo do, how does it work, do you just upload it and watch it go to work, or must you edit any settings or what not. Anyone know anythign about this
I use zoints seo and it works great. + its free! Don't do the mod rewrite, if your forum gets big, it will put a huge load on the server. You can still have pretty urls without going that far.
We have configuration options; however, our default installation settings are often all you will need. One of the main things we accomplish for SEO purposes is link consistency. See here for more details: http://www.vbseo.com/f2/pin-tail-seo-donkey-link-consensus-14029/
It will practically rewrite URLs from forum.yoursite.com/showthread.php?thread=11111 to forums.yoursite.com/title-of-thread .. thats simple. Tho, i don't know how useful vbSEO is (was interested when i wanted to launch a forum once and ended up on this post on SEOrefugee which explains very well WHY they dropped vbSEO from their forum) after that read, i gave up of vbSEO (so i can't tell from my own experience).
If you haven't paid for all your forum software yet I would recommend checking out WWW Threads, SEO built in.... it's beautiful.
vbSeo is awesome. It does a lot more than making URL's "pretty"...it's a full on SEO package that will get you more traffic to your forums.
It doesn't matter how big your forums because it will not slow down the server really that much unless you have alot of traffic going to the actual forums to view the pages.