Forum Marketing | SEO Via Forums
As online forums continue mounting popularity, search engine optimization professionals have found a viable outlet for inbound links, business networking, and free marketing. Since forums are typically organized around narrow, niche topics, contributing to the right ones can be highly beneficial to your site.
Currently, most forum contributors are motivated individuals hungry for fresh information. They foster a strong affinity for a particular topic and aim to engage in constructive conversations or debates with like-minded individuals. This is precisely what makes forums such an attractive arena for SEO professionals – the target audience is already gathered in one place. Thus forums are essentially fish in a barrel.
So how do you take advantage of forums?
From an SEO standpoint, the best avenue is offering valuable snippets of material that will lure readers from the forum to your site. While most forum hosts have a strong distaste for spam and often remove such posts, most do allow (some even encourage) a little self promotion with the use of personalized signatures. These are the parting goodbyes traditionally found at the end of letters or emails (i.e. Sincerely, John Smith).
For example, say you own an Iowa Internet marketing company and want to drive more traffic to your site via forums. The first step would be locating some quality SEO or web design forums with forum traffic or relatively high page rank, for there is little benefit in gaining a worthless link. As most decent forums have above average page rank, this shouldn’t prove too difficult.
The next step is signing up and creating a signature with your name and Web site URL. Most users prefer leaving a straight URL, but it might be even more beneficial to embed the link in keyword rich anchor text. Then you can begin surfing for forum topics you are either knowledgeable of or have written about on your own site. If you cannot immediately locate any, consider establishing a new thread with an original topic. Assuming you did find one you like, compose a relevant post that adds some additional information the thread creator might have excluded.
Not only will the signature with your URL afford you a quality inbound link to your site, but it can also draw new visitors. Informative and insightful posts indicate to readers that your site probably has additional resourceful information, and thus they will be enticed to click through.
Many forum contributors check out their favorite forums on a regular basis – for some “regular” can mean quite often – so earning their respect can breed networking possibilities. The more informative posts you compose the more opportunities for forum participants to evaluate the quality of your ideas. And good ideas generally lead to good traffic for your site.
