An important part of generating traffic to your website or blog is to
rank highly in the search engine result pages. In addition to having
good, relevant content on your site one of the best ways to increase
your search ranking is to get high quality backlinks to your site.

Backlinks are hyperlinks placed on another website which link to your
site. The most powerful backlinks are one-way backlinks. This means that
another website has links pointing to your site, but you don’t have
reciprocal links pointing back to theirs.

Using forums is a great way to get high quality one-way backlinks to
your site. These links can generate direct traffic to your site, as
people browsing the forum click your links in addition to raising your
search engine ranking. But you have to be careful when using forums in
this way. Do it wrong and you will be branded a spammer and most likely
get your forum account closed. But if done correctly, forums can be a
very powerful tool in your traffic generation arsenal.

Step 1: Find relevant forums
The key word here is ‘relevant’. You want to be sure to find forums
related to your niche – the topic of your website. The easiest way to do
this is to go to Google and type in your topic along with the the word
‘forum’. Let’s say you have a blog on coin collecting. You’d type this
into Google:

coin collecting forum

There are two reasons you want to find forums related to your niche.
First, the search engines will usually give more weight to links
pointing to your site if they come from sites centered around the same
niche as your site. Secondly, you’ll get much more direct traffic from a
forum where the members are interested in your niche.

Step 2: Pick the best forums and join them
Now that you have found some forums you need to check them out and
choose which ones to join. Click the links to visit about half a dozen
of the top search results. Most forums will allow you to view the
content without having to join, it’s only when you want to start posting
that you have to register. If you land on a forum that won’t let you
view unless you join, forget it and move on.

When looking for a forum to join you want to find ones that are popular,
so look for those with a decent number of members. You also need to make
sure those members are active. Go into one of the more popular forums
categories and scan down the list of threads to see when the last
posting was made. This information is usually in the right hand column
of the forum threads table. If you see a lot of posts made in the last
24 hours, you’ve found a forum with lots of active members. With the
content changing this often, the search engines should be all over that
forum, which means that your links will get picked up quickly. Search
engines tend to love sites with lots of frequently updated, relevant
content. This is the type of forum you want to join.

Now there is just one more step before joining. You need to make sure
this forum allows you to have a ‘signature’. Jump into one of the more
popular threads on the forum. Scroll down and look at the posts to see
if anyone has a signature showing at the bottom of their post. There
will usually be a horizontal line after the body of the post and some
text and/or links underneath it. Often people just have a quote or witty
saying, but sometimes they will have links as well. Not everyone will
have a signature, but try to find some members who do. Signatures are
crucial, because this is where you are going to put the links to your
site.

When you find a forum that meets the criteria, follow the steps to
register and confirm your membership. If you find just three or four
forums that’s plenty to start with.

Step 3: Set up your signature
After you login to the forum you should see a link to your user profile.
Often this will be called ‘User CP’ or ‘User Profile’. In the user
profile area you can edit things like your avatar, your bio and
preferences. Look for a link that says something like ‘Edit signature’
and click that. You’ll see a text field where you can type in the text
you want to appear beneath all your posts. This is where you’ll put the
backlinks to your site.

Forums use a special kind of code to allow members to format their
posts. It’s called BBCode and it’s quite simple to use once you get the
hang of it. Copy the examples below and change the URL and text to your
URL and some catchy keyword-rich text. Paste the code into you signature
box and save it.

Link to your website or blog with this code:

Learn how to start [url=http://www.mycoinblog.com/]Coin Collecting[/url]
the easy way.

You can see in the code above where you need to edit the domain to be
your domain. In this example, ‘Coin Collecting’ will be the anchor text
for the link. This is where you want to put your keywords. Almost all
forums will allow you to have a link in your signature.

If you want to make your signature bold, just add the bold tags around
it like this:

[b]Learn how to start [url=http://www.mycoinblog.com/]Coin
Collecting[/url] the easy way.[/b]

Most forums will allow you to bold the text in your signature. If you
add the bold code and your signature still doesn’t come out in bold then
it’s you know the bold formatting is not allowed.

Some forums will also allow you to change the color of the text,
although the anchor text will come out as the default link color,
usually blue. Here’s how you change the text color:

[color=red]Learn how to start [url=http://www.mycoinblog.com/]Coin
Collecting[/url] the easy way.[/color]

You can also combine formatting. This would make your signature red and
bold (except for the link text which will usually be blue bold).

[color=red][b]Learn how to start [url=http://www.mycoinblog.com/]Coin
Collecting[/url] the easy way.[/b][/color]

One final tip for creating your signature. Less is more. If you make
your signature look spamming people will treat you like a spammer. You
don’t have to use up all available lines in your signature. Make it
short, sweet and to the point. If you post great content and people are
interested they will click your link.

Step 4: Participate!
The first three steps were all preparation. Now you get to start
creating backlinks to your site! It’s simple, just participate in the
forum. Post good content, ask questions. Try to help people out by
answering questions. Be nice, be helpful.

Every post you make will give you a backlink to your site. The higher
the quality of your post, the more powerful your backlink will be, at
least in Google. Because Google looks at the text surrounding a link to
determine the relevancy of a link having good content in your posts is
much more valuable than having a post that says something like, “great
post, I agree”. If you simply participate in the forum and try to be
friendly and helpful chances are your content will take care of itself.

That’s it. Have fun. And remember, you can change your signature any
time you want. You might changing the text a bit from time to time to
find out what generates the most clicks through to your site.

Bob

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