SEO Link Building: Forum or Against ‘Em ?
One of the staples of smart online marketing strategies revolves around publishing helpful articles via blog. This is helpful in and of itself, but it serves a dual purpose. Not only are you offering valuable content to your online community, but you’re also getting people to link back to your blog post, and therefore building your linking power (also known as link baiting). Quality links to your website are important for a strong online presence if you’re looking to be seen by the big search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc.
So why stop there? In addition to publishing useful content on your blog, you can jump start your online presence by becoming an active part of your relevant online community. You need to start posting in forums.
Let’s be a bit more specific. You need to start posting useful information in communities that are relevant to your website’s niche.
Example: You have a website for your extermination business. You can seek out two types of resources, forums specifically for exterminators to exchange information with other exterminators, and forums where people who are not involved in the industry go to seek help from exterminators.
You’ll want to read the forums rules on posting before you do anything, but after you get an idea of the environment, you can begin reading through the threads and posting opinions, advice, or anything that you think will add to the community. You’ll want to add your website link into your forum signature, so that way every time you post something, you will be adding an external link to your website.
If you find that someone has posted a particular problem or question to which you have a useful answer, try this: Write up a quick informative blog article on the subject, and instead of answering the question directly, submit your article link and tell them that you’ve added a useful tutorial on your blog. Not only will you have a grateful individual on your hand, but they might spread your websites link to other people that could find it useful.
By becoming part of useful communities, you’re serving two purposes. One, you’re building relevant backlinks to your website, and two, you’re building your reputation as a credible source of information in the industry. If you can convince other professionals in your field that you’re a source of relevant information, it will be easy to get your colleagues to give you quality backlinks, the only kind of backlinks that boost your search engine ranking.
Go look through some relevant forums and see how you can become part of the community. Go make some awesome blog posts and start linking to them. In no time, people will start to take notice, and when people start to take notice, so does Google, Yahoo, Bing, and the like. It does an online marketing strategy good.