Forum signature usage
Continues from The benefit to participate in web forum communities article.
Apart from making new contacts, learnig from others experience and exchanging new ideas, the Internet community forums can bring valuable traffic to your web site. To make this possible a link to your web site should be included with every post you make in the forum. However, not all threads and post are suitable to mention your web site or web sites, but if a link to the web site is included in the users signature, then it can be added to every post the user make.
There are two main reasons to add link to your web site in your forum signature:
To attract the search engines with more incoming links.
Internet forums are usually places with a lot of textual content that is non stop updating. The search engines love such places and once they discover that the content change often, they start visiting these web site more often that the other web sites that do not update their content so often. When the search engines crawl the web pages they index not only the textual content of the web page, but also the meta links placed on the web page. These links, once indexed by the search engines are stored to their data base and scheduled for visiting too.
For the search engines, there are two important factors about the meta links to your web site:
The number of web sites that link to your web site and the number of meta links. Generally, more links to your web site means better placement in the search engine results. This has direct impact on the probability a new visitor to find your web site and not only because the search engines will show your web address but because when the search engines show an web site where link to your web page exists and somebody visit that result, then he/she will obviously notice the link to your site too.
The meta link text is the other important item. It shall describe the landing page content and at the same time to consists of a few words only, best of all these shall be the web page key words. This increase the relevance of the link and the search engines consider its more important.
To attract the other forum users to visit your web site.
When one post to a community forums, the content of his/her posts are used by the other forum visitors (often subconsciously) to determine the experience, reliability and creativity of the person. When the posts are creative and useful, the other community members often visit the web site shown as a home site or the links in the signature of the author. It is in the human nature to be interested to get to know better the other people we converse with. In this aspect the home web site and the forum signature links are just the items we are looking for.
The text of the forum signature links is important not to the search engines only, but to the other forum visitors too. Consider the example when a link to your web page is found in the page that one open based on the search engine results. Obviously the person is looking for something specific. If the text of you link grabs the attention and is related to what the internet user searches for, then its chances to be visited increase. Consider also the relevance. If the link of your web site say “red vine” for example, then the web page that will be loaded (the landing page) must be about vine. This also creates some sort of trust between the visitor and between the web site owner from the very beginning. If it is about anything else, completely not relevant to what the meta link text say, then the web site loose one visitor and its owner loose potential customer.
In conclusion, the web community forums are wonderful way to do some networking, to promote your web site for free and to make new business contacts too. Use them wise, do not spam and do not try to trick the other community members with cheap links to defraud web pages. Try to be helpful and it might turn in the most powerful advertisement for you.
Read also:
October 2006 pool “Do you visit the links in the forum members' signature?”
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