Improving your link popularity is an absolute necessity if you are to have any chance of building your website rankings and popularity. The SEO specialist will tell you that you have to use a number of techniques for creating a back link to your site. Several kinds of link building methods exist and each has its good qualities as well as drawbacks.
One such search engine link popularity strategy is forum link building. Forum link building is done by using forum posting to build links to your website. How effective are forum backlinks? The technique has come under a lot of scrutiny as one way to build a link, but some believe that improving your link popularity using forums is spamming, while others actually question whether or not it has any value at all so far as helping with site popularity. Many SEO “experts” will tell you that the only way to go with inbound link creation is organic link building.
Ideally organic link building would be the best method. Organic link building, in case you just tuned in to SEO, is increasing your link popularity which is actually done without effort on your part. All that you’ve done really is to build a good solid site and add creative content that got noticed. A blog or other website sees this content and wants to link back to it by virtue of the good work that you are doing in creating useful content. You get targeted a link and in this way, build a link to your website without any real effort.
Forum link building is not organic link building. It does require effort on your part. It does, in many cases provide a link that is “do follow”. It does give you some kind of an inbound link, but does it give you any link juice?
There are literally thousands of forums online. People seek out those forums and then spend time on the message board discussing topics that are of mutual interest. They are typically topic centric, and as such, can easily be targeted to build links to your website.
The idea with this method for building a back link is to find a forum that is pertinent, or “relevant” to your website and then to become a member of that forum. After a specific amount of time or posting, you are then permitted to add a link to your website in the signature or the text of your website. Usually it will take between ten and twenty posts before you earn the right to be able to leave a link in your signature. As you can see, there is no small amount of time or effort required in order to build links to your website using this method.
Is this type of link an effective link to your site, or are you just wasting your time and energy on creating forum back links?
Asking two questions will answer how effective the strategy is and whether or not it’s one that you want to use to build inks to your website. Is this a strategy that you have to do yourself? If so, you’re probably going to find that your time will be better spent on other methods of getting a quality back link such as article marketing. There is very little doubt that this method is time-consuming. It is however cost effective in that you’re able to do it yourself.
Researching the forums that you will use to build links to your website is imperative. Making sure that the link candidates come from a good neighborhood, that these links will have a chance of getting a quality click-through-rate and that the traffic is targeted to your niche is also important. If you’re not sure that this is possible for you in the time that you have to work with, chances are that you’ll want to hire someone to help you with forum link building as it can take some time to accomplish.
Using a forum on gardening to point back to your computer blog probably won’t net you the traffic that you want, nor will it get you the kind of visitors who will do more than bounce onto your site and then back off. Typically the click volume from these guests will not be inordinately high.
Forums are for the most part also not considered authority sites by search engines such as Google. The links are not, therefore, of a very high quality. In the eyes of the search engines, this doesn’t count as that all important vote in most cases. Attaining some high quality forums and using those for backlinks to your site will help you, however. It can have a significant impact on the search engine’s ranking of your website.
Choosing your forums wisely when you are using them to build links to your website is the most important part of forum link building. Research each one to assure that they permit outbound links, and that the links that you are building will offer some type of search engine ranking benefit to you. Inbound links from forums, even the higher quality ones tend to carry less weight, so you will need to use more of these links to give you the boost that you’re looking for. That being said, due to the fact that there are so many forums out there to be used, finding those which will permit links in your signature after a time is not difficult and is a good way to achieve some kind of help without having to pay for the inbound links when you are working to build links to your website.
Have you had success with forums? Let us know your thoughts in the comment form below.
