One of the simplest ways to get backlinks and traffic is to participate in forums that do not apply the “nofollow” attribute to anchor tags in signatures. By putting links to your sites in your forum signature, every post you make gets you free back links and potential visitors.
If you have too many sites or too little time, there are people you can hire to do posts for you, however, make sure they are making quality posts and not spamming the forums or your posts will get deleted. You can find people offering this service on sites like Digital Point and WickedForums. If you opt to use a service like this, verify that they have a lot of good feedback and give them a test run by purchasing the smallest number of posts they offer.
Ideally you’ll want forums that relate to your sites although this insn’t required to get some benefit from the backlinks. Picking a forum that you’re interested in and will regularly contribute to is best. You’ll also have to make sure that the backlinks will be indexed by the search engines. The simplest way to do this is pull up a post on the forum, view the page’s source code in your browser and check to see if links in member’s signatures have “nofollow” in them. If not, you’re good.
Here’s a good list of forums that have “dofollow” signatures:
Forum List
The value of a backlink, PR wise, is based on the PR of the page it’s on and how many other links are on it. Most thread pages aren’t going to have a good PR unless they are a popular thread and even then, only the first page is likely to have a decent PR. To ensure you’re getting the most “PR juice” from your efforts, find threads that are being linked to from the homepage, list of top posts or other high PR page. If you’re post isn’t buried too many pages deep in the thread, this will give your backlinks a bit more strength.
You’re not going to see a big gain in PR for a while and only after you’ve made a considerable number of posts. For this reason, getting traffic should be your primary target. This means you will want to ensure your signature is clean, attractive and eye catching. Take a look at the signature links of others and notice which ones catch your eye best. Use a similar layout and color for yours. Also important is making quality posts as obvious spamming of your links or producing junk content just to rack up posts will be obvious to other forum members and they will have little interest in visiting your sites. In contrast, if you contribute quality content, others will have trust and respect in you and will be inclined to check out your sites. Over time, you’ll be surprised at how much traffic you can get from your posts.
When done properly, forum advertising can increase the search engine ranking of your site, get you more targeted traffic and help get a new site in the search engines faster. Give it a try!
