When Considering An Overall SEO Strategy Don’t Forget Forum Posting
Laborious and time intensive, forum posting is an important element our team at Hunter Marketing often call out when creating an overall SEO strategy. One of the oldest interactive type of websites on the internet, forums are an excellent way to interact with specific communities, speak directly to individuals in need of your services, prove you are the authority on specific topic, product or industry, and create a variety of sites referencing your content. In this article we will outline some of the most common reasons we note for including forums as a part of an overall marketing strategy, why they work, and what not to do when posting to forums.
How Forum Posting Increases SEO
As mentioned above, forums are the oldest interactive type of website. They predate social media, and the communities are often highly targeted. Forums are a place where individuals can ask questions and receive answers from a combination of certified professionals, laymen, and the general public. They are usually monitored by site owners and often require a registration, profile, or post approval prior to publication. Some forums achieve a minimal amount of traffic while others produce enough traffic to flood webservers and bring down websites that are unprepared for the sudden spike. Here are some the top ways forum posting can increase your SEO score.
Increases Backlinks From Authoritative Websites
Participating in forums allows you the opportunity to includes a link back to your website from the forum post. This is commonly only available in your signature or from your profile, but in some instances you may create this link directly from the post itself. Backlinks contribute to your website’s link profile. Each link back to your website has an opportunity to improve your SEO score.
To understand how a forum backlink helps boost your SEO score you must first understand the mechanics of a backlink. When sites link back to your website they either use ‘dofollow’ or ‘nofollow’ attributes. Each attribute tells indexing robots whether to count the link as a backlink and follow it, or not. A ‘dofollow’ provides juice to boost your SEO score. ‘Nofollow’ links don’t provide the same juice, but that doesn’t mean they’re not worth placing. Even ‘nofollow’ links can generate referral traffic from site visitors thus enhancing your online visibility and mentions to your website through your profile. What’s important is to always include the link, even in the instance of a ‘nofollow’ backlink.
Generating Topic Related Referral Traffic
Answering questions, providing insights, and contributing to conversations provide value to forum visitors. Through active participation in forums you can attract the attention of forum users. The more useful they find your content to be increases the likelihood of them visiting your website. They will click on those backlinks in your signature or within your post. This generates targeted traffic from users familiar with your products and services which leads to new customers, leads, or buyers.
Increases Brand Exposure To Targeted Audiences
Helpful participation in providing content in forums establishes your brand as an expert on a specific topic or in a specific field. This enhances your brand reputation, ultimately positioning you as an authority. When forum users see your valuable contributions, they begin to recognize, seek out, and follow your brand for further information or assistance. This type of traffic, called organic traffic, helps to increase your ranking for specific terms, which gains you mentions, and in turn backlinks.
Hyper Targeting Keywords & Key Terms
Seeking out questions and conversations pertaining to your targeted keywords and key terms plus including relevant keywords and key terms in your forum signature, profile, or within forum posts is essential. This helps search engines associate those key elements to your website. This increases the chances of ranking higher in search results for those specific keywords.
Increases Social Signals
A social signal is any activity such as a like, share, mention, or engagement. Search engines see social signals as indications of quality and relevance. Actively participating in forums allows you to engage with other users, receive likes or upvotes for your content. This directly, and indirectly influences your SEO efforts by demonstrating to search engines that your website is valuable and deserves to outrank your competitors.
The Right Place At The Right Time
At Hunter Marketing, our team knows where to find reputable forums and provide responses that receive positive reviews, creating traffic to your brand properties. The effort is unique as it isn’t directly related to sales, but is also provided at the most opportune moment during the sales cycle, between learning about the need and seeking a provider to help with it. The leads you receive are actively looking for the solution to a problem, and this is where they have already found you. Before they reach out, they are often already sold on you being an authority, and therefore the leads you receive are easier to close.
What Not To Do When Posting To Forums
Now that we have gone over some of the key reasons to use forums in your SEO strategy, it is equally important to consider what not to do. Spamming or other ‘black hat’ SEO techniques seem to be a simple, faster way to achieve the desired outcome. Before you go this route, we urge you to reconsider. Shortcuts are well known and search engines have safeguards in place to prevent those techniques from helping to increase your organic page positions.
So, just what are these things you should do when posting to forums? In general, they’re the same techniques you don’t want to see in the comments to blog posts and in social media. They’re considered obnoxious and do not contribute to the conversation and include copied content, spamming, and irrelevant content.
Copied Content
Posting content that has already been published or that you have posted somewhere else isn’t beneficial. Search engines only give authority to pieces the first time they’re published. Copying and pasting content from one place to another doesn’t increase optimization. This is not to be confused with quoting short pieces of content within original content and giving recognition to the original piece. This is only when that quote is considered relevant or enhances the overall response.
Irrelevant Content
This brings us to the second point, irrelevant content. There are almost infinite forum conversations to join and questions to answer. There’s no reason to post content that’s irrelevant. Not only will it receive a poor response it may tarnish your authority by being viewed as someone that doesn’t understand the question being asked, the conversation being had, or the topic being discussed.
Spamming
Spamming takes various forms, so for this example we will strictly be using the most obvious type of spamming, a short description and link. Many spammers post the same short description or a call to action with a link over and over to forums, comments, and websites. By doing this, or similar activities, you may cause your website to be seen as spam and reduce the quality associated with it’s content.
Performing any of these activities can actually cause your SEO score to decrease and your position to plummet. SEO takes time and effort to build the right way. There are no shortcuts but there are ways to increase it’s efficiency and that’s through the quality of the sites you post to, and the content you post. We have extensive experience in this field and have seen many businesses inadvertently reduce their quality score by not having a firm strategy. The biggest thing to keep in mind about forum posting is that it is a single element in an overall SEO and marketing strategy that can be effective when properly performed.
If you need assistance or don’t know where to start, contact the team at Hunter Marketing. We can create a custom strategy based on your goals and needs that helps increase your organic ranking over time.
