May 21st, 2010 by Mike

When most site owners think of link building, forums aren’t what usually come to mind. The humble forum is the kind of site that never really comes to the forefront of public attention. They’ve been around since the dawn of the internet, and they will no doubt continue on their way, relatively low-tech in comparison to their flashier social media cousins. Low-tech as they are, the industry forums in your area can be of immense help in your SEO link building campaign.

There are all kinds of fancy link building services available today, but it’s important for every site owner to build whatever links they can for themselves. Forums are a great resource when it comes to this, as they are best approached by people with a genuine investment in the subject area. Participation in industry forums can build your reputation as well as your link profile.

1. Direct link building: Forums can be a valuable source of inbound links on their own. In making posts and setting up a member profile, you have the opportunity to seed some links back to your own pages. The benefit of this is that you have almost total control over how the links appear and where they lead to. This is unlike some other links you might receive, where the linking site determines which page they want to link to and embeds it in anchor text of their choice.

As always, the positive aspects of forums for links are balanced out by the negative ones. Not all forums have a great ranking, which means that the value of the links you receive from them will be fairly low. Unless the forum is very specific to your niche, the relevance of the link will also be low. This is important to remember when you’re posting in the forum, so that you link back to pages with the same keywords as that particular comments stream.

2. Spreading word of mouth. The value of word-of-mouth is often underestimated. Word-of-mouth plays a big part in organic linking. With natural linking, if people like your stuff, they link to you: simple.

These kinds of natural links are exactly the types of links Google most values, so it’s important to foster them where you can. Forums can be a great source of natural links, but only if you participate and add value to the community. It’s also important to keep your site jam-packed with valuable information, so that when your forum followers drop in, they see something they like. Talk to us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk about the right kind of content for your site.

3. Boosting viral campaigns: Companies often launch virals without the proper support. A good viral campaign needs buzz to generate traffic, and buzz doesn’t just happen by itself. If you’ve got a viral campaign on the go, dropping a few mentions into appropriate forums can be a great way to attract attention. A simple ‘hey, have you seen this?’ post can generate traffic for your viral and ultimately links for your site.

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