Small Business Marketing Consultant
All across the internet people flock to forums to share with people of like mind on various hobbies, careers, or other interests. As a business owner, joining a forum and contributing to it can generate more traffic to your website, improve your online reputation and also provide a steady source of high quality backlinks to your main business website.
Small Business Marketing Consultant|Types of forum backlinks
Forums provide three types of backlinks
1. Signature links –these are the links found at the bottom of each and every contribution you make, like a signature.
2. Contextual links- these links are embedded within the text of your contribution. These are not so common so you need to look for forums that allow this.
3. Profile links- once you open an account on a forum, you need to fill out your profile data and you can include a website address. This address then become your profile backlink
A major benefit of forum backlinks is that once you create them, they tend to get found quickly by Google and therefore have fast indexing rates. This is because forums are usually very active with lots of fresh content posted on a daily basis so the search engines regularly crawl them for this new content.
Unfortunately forum backlinks can be easily get deleted by forum owners. The way around this problem is to just build a profile and make meaningful contributions. Then a week or two later, you can add a signature link. In this way, when the forum editors go through the new forum posts they will only see your contributions and will not delete them.
Small Business Marketing Consultant|How to find forums
1. Go to Google Groups and then type this search operator:
Your keyword inurl:forum
E.g. dentist inurl:forum
It’s best to use a general keyword that covers your niche. So if your website is about your hardware store in New Hampshire, use general keywords such as plumber, contractor, and house repair
2. Go to the main Google search box and type in your general keyword. Then click on the Discussions/Talk tab on the left. This will list groups and forums talking about your keyword. Try and find pages with high page rank.
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