Using Traditional Forums to Get Good Quality Links.

by Andy Calloway

Opposite to what the industry media would probably have you believe, folk have been having discussions online before the introduction of Facebook.

Just about the most common methods of interaction and one that is flourishing these days is the ‘forum’.

Forums are fundamentally discussion boards where people can begin a ‘thread’ and other people contribute to it, or simply start a massive debate regarding the topic at hand. Simply because of the huge range of topics in the world as well as the particular large number of individuals with access to the Internet, generally there is actually an almost limitless amount of boards in which you could end up being a part of, a few currently being more common than some.

Message boards can easily be exceptionally favorable to your SEO campaign due to the fact that they could achieve a couple of tasks in our mission.

Firstly, they can certainly often be a wonderful location to get hyperlinks from (and inbound links help your SEO ranking) and second of all, by using communal interaction one can doubtless find new sales opportunities in addition to fresh potential consumers.

However, attaching hyperlinks to your current forum communications is generally a big ‘no’ within many boards, therefore much not unlike social networking, you need to become a touch clever about it.

One section of the site that many boards have in common will be the ’signature’ (or “sig file”). This is a piece of code that gets combined with each post you’re making and oftentimes you can include back links in it.

A word of warning though – many forums frown on adding signatures early on and it’s well worth taking part in the discussion board initially and getting a bit of a name for yourself before including any. Quite a few boards enforce a principle where you have to have put up a specific number of responses before they’ll allow you to add some kind of signature to your content.

Remember, in any community, you are essentially a visitor on their system and if you do anything that goes in opposition to their guidelines and ethics, they’re quite inside of their rights to get rid of you.

You will discover also another thing to look out for – the ‘no-follow’ tag.

The online world of boards is separated pretty much equally between those that adore website visitors and their own hyperlinks, and individuals who really don’t. It’s a chicken and egg factor because individuals who would likely positively encourage you to post backlinks on their websites will end up obtaining lots of website visitors and as such a good amount of back links themselves – maximizing global recognition, however some people would certainly also get an awful lot of spam.

Nevertheless individuals who don’t like people leaving back links, or make it really complicated to do so may lose out on loads of traffic. At the end of the day, it really depends on the subject of the site and whether it’s monetized in any way. Some of those that don’t like you leaving links will sometimes give each link an attribute that was introduced only a few years ago, the ‘nofollow’.

This attribute is entered as part of a standard link and is notified by the code rel=’nofollow’ near the ‘anchor’ tag. What this does is tell search spiders (the routines that search engines send out to examine the web) that the link it is about to look at should not be ‘followed’, in effect it should be ignored..

Now, many SEO experts disagree as to whether this actually means a link using ‘nofollow’ is completely pointless and some will show evidence that shows that it does actually make a difference and shouldn’t be discounted completely, however most will agree that if you’re going to look for links, make more of an effort on those that don’t use this attribute.

You see, it’s really not worth being too picky about these sites because those who don’t allow links probably have a greater value. They are less likely to be full of spam and therefore worth more in general social networking. Also, it could be that they allow links after you’ve given a bit back to the community.

So that’s it really. Investigate and analyse your link building techniques and you’ll find ways to increase your website’s SERPs without breaking the bank.

About the Author: Andy Calloway is an SEO Training specialist.

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