US$149 is quite steep for features which should be available straight out of the box IMO.
I don't have much experience with VBulletin and none whatsoever of VBSEO, but I would guess that most (all?) of the same SEO features are available for SMF for free. And probably will be available for phpBB3 shortly, once a few good MODs are created by the community.
SEO features I think are good for forums include the following:
A good HTML coding job. Most forums have awful semantical layout, including all VBulletin themes I've seen. I'm assuming this could be corrected with a new them, but well coded theme are rare/non-existent. I haven't seen any well coded themes for SMF at all, although some members of the SMF community have improved significantly on the default coding base. The only major forum I've seen which has good a HTML base is phpBB3. Other forums with good coding include Vanilla and bbPress, but they are of limited use due to being quite basic.
Forums need the ability to avoid ALL duplicate content, and to ensure that when topics are moved, that the original URL is either kept, or that the URL 301 redirects to the new one. If they don't do this, you risk the problem of receiving duplicate content penalties from search engines. Deleted topics also need to be redirected somewhere useful rather than giving an annoying 404 error.
Other necessary features would be good titles. If you look at the titles here at the Developer Tutorials, they look quite reasonable and are usually quite informative about what the page is about as they're based on the topic title - some older forums don't do this.
Creation of a Sitemap could be a valuable SEO tool as well as there is no way you can manually create a sitemap for any reasonably large forum.
Pretty URL's is another good feature for SEO, as this provides an extra snippet of information for search engines and creates an easier to understand/remember URL for humans.
Plus there is probably a bunch of other SEO features forums should have, but I have forgotten about.
So ... where I was going with was .... if VBSEO has all of the features in an easily installed and configured system, then yes, it is a reasonable price. Otherwise it's a bit steep IMO as you can get those features for free from other systems anyway, albeit they take a bit of fiddling to get working.
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