How to Use Forum Posts to Make Your SEO Campaign More Efficient
Forum posts are becoming a more and more popular way of increasing the page ranking of company websites and individual blogs alike. Forums are communities the members of which share the same interest and passion and are willing to disseminate information about the topic that interests them, helping each other solve niche-related problems.
Given these special features of forums, posting comments that provide help for one or more users while also referring to your own website or blog can benefit your sales not only by establishing you as a helpful and knowledgeable vendor or service provider, but also by drawing attention towards your products and services and increasing the page ranking of your website by providing high-quality, organic backlinks.
What Is Forum Posting?
Forum posting is similar to online article submissions, with a few major differences, though. Let’s start with the similarities between the two methods:
- Both SEO articles published on directories and forum posts involve the creation of content with the triple objective of providing help with a problem frequently encountered by your audience, of directing targeted traffic towards your own website and improving the position of your site on search engine results pages.
- Both types of content need to be structured around carefully chosen keywords and provide relevant information. Articles and forum posts need to have relevant titles and they need to address a specific problem encountered by those interested in your area of activity or niche.
- Just like in the case of articles, with forum posts too you must avoid verbosity and fluffy content – posts that simply thank for the contribution of the previous entry will never yield the desired results; what’s more, you risk getting your post deleted or your entire account banned from the forum. If your contribution is really valuable for the other forum members, your reputation will improve, you can establish yourself as an authority in the niche and your recommendations will be regarded highly and followed with interest by other members.
- Both types of content need to be published on websites relevant for the topic of the content. With SEO articles, you need to find the most popular article directories, used by the highest number of people interested in what you are doing, while in the case of forum posts, you need to find the forum communities that take the most interest in your niche. If you are a company that provides IT support, it would be useless to publish entries on forums reserved for health care topics, but if you choose an authoritative forum in the niche to post articles, you will not only be able to reach out to more people, but you will also increase the number of valuable backlinks generated for your website.
- If you want your articles and forum posts to be efficient, you need to respect the guidelines of the medium you are posting on – otherwise you risk your articles and forum posts to be deleted instantly.
Two of the major differences between SEO articles and forum posts are dimension and the level of interactivity. A forum post is typically much shorter than an SEO article, which obviously requires the writer of the post to be more concise and straight to the point. Though you can read really extensive forum posts as well, quicker, more focused replies are usually more efficient, and they encourage more interactivity – the other significant difference between directory or magazine article submission and forum posting.
How to Create Forum Posts
Forum post creation is relatively easy. All you need to do is find a relevant thread in an authoritative forum, create your own profile where you add the URL of the website or landing page you are promoting and then start adding your own contribution. You can also decide to start your own thread by describing a problem or offering a solution to a problem that is widespread, but not yet mentioned in the forum; then you can engage into conversations with the other forum members. Whenever you post a comment, your forum nickname and other account details will be displayed next to your comment, so that other members can find out more about you.
You can either decide to create your forum posts yourself or ask for professional help from an experienced company to provide you with forum posting services, thus saving valuable time.
Posting interesting and relevant comments on authoritative forums will help you get organic, high-quality traffic to your website, increasing your page ranking efficiently and positioning your site among the top results on search engines. Increased traffic will soon translate into increased sales, and your forum posts will also convince other people in your niche that you are a reliable and reputable expert in your area of activity, helping a lot with your branding efforts as well.
