BLOG SEO ENGINE

The benefit of having my own forum is that I can manage the conversation and take advantage of the many benefits of being a forum owner. However, you DON’T need to own a forum to benefit your Search Engine Optimization. How can you use forums to improve your rankings? The answer is quite obvious. You can use forums to generate inbound links to your websites and blogs. The question of how to do this is what we are focusing on. The first step in any link-building initiative is to find a relevant forum and start posting. You can begin by doing a Google search or by usingbig-boards.com. There are a few things that you need to look for :

Once you have researched possible forums and created a list of at least ten that meet your criteria, it’s time to register and start posting. Before you start posting there are a few things you’ll need to take care of. The first is to register for the forum accepting the terms and conditions. This is usually a very simple process that may require a valid email and clicking on a confirmation link. Once complete, you can log into the forum and visit your control panel.

The control panel is the place on the forum where you can set up your preferences and your forum signature. All forums have a control panel which may be labeled as the "CP" or "Profile." This is the area where you control how your forum signature, what shows beneath each post, will appear. Keep in mind that many forums require you to make ten full posts before allowing your signature to show. This is due to the fact that more and more people are using forums to build third-party links to their websites, blogs, and affiliate offers.

Set up your signature to include a link to your website using a keyword phrase as your anchor text. Many signatures allow up to three links but I would limit your signature to two. Use the "|" symbol we discussed earlier so you can include two keyword phrases for each link. Once your signature is set up, it’s time to start posting. Always check the box that says "Display my signature" if available.

To make the most of your forum posting, find threads (questions and responses) about a topic on which you can comment. Having my own forum, I know that many of the posts can be of poor quality. When they are, my moderators may delete them. If you’re going to leave a comment on the forum, make sure it’s a good one. The more valuable your comments, the more staying power they’ll have. Additionally, a number of forums have integrated social media opportunities. This means that if your question or response is of high quality, others may use Social Bookmarks to identify them or share via social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook. Similar to blog commenting, forum posts should be relevant, meaningful, and valuable. This gives your signature links the "link juice" you want.

Always pace your forum posting. The goal is to find ten relevant forums that you can actively contribute to on a monthly basis. I used to spend a lot of time in forums but found that forum posting-although extremely valuable-can be very time consuming as well. A few forum-posting tools out there can aid in making posts, but manual submissions are still the most powerful and require a little work.

I share some of my Outsourcing strategies later in this guide. Outsourcing something like forum posting provides a really good return on your investment. My recommendation is to do the research, set up your profiles and make the initial posts on the most popular niche forums. Once you’ve completed that work you are in a great position to outsource your forum posting activities.

A lot of people assume that any time they want to promote a different website or change a signature for future posts they can simply log into their forum control panel and change their signature. The assumption is that changing their signature only affects future posts. This is often not the case. Changing your signature may impact all existing posts already submitted on the forum. As a result, it may be necessary to create multiple accounts so that you can have truly unique signatures that stand the test of time.