Link Building With Discussion Forums - An Accidental Discovery

I recently had a question about configuring some software for my website and proceeded to go to a discussion forum about the software. When I was posting my question, I had actually linked to my website to show what I was talking about to the forum for help and I re-discovered a long lost link building tactic that I haven't used in years.

Some discussion forums are extremely popular, well indexed in search engines and highly relative content to certain businesses or industries. These can make for excellent places to have one-way links to your website established easily and usually at no cost.

In this particular case, I was browsing my web logs and noticed that I was actually getting some direct traffic to my website from this AND I also happened to notice that the page in the form with my questions was ranking well in search engines and it seemed was getting traffic as well.

Some SEO folks argue that search engines devalue links from discussion forums significantly and do not count them toward improving your website's search engine ranking. That's fine with me. Some forum's pages rank extremely well and you can get direct traffic from the links.

Plus, if you are already active in a forum, how much extra work is it to include a link to your website in your signature anyway. If you are already going to be posting, you might just as well get some additional benefit from it.

So, don't forget to include valid, appropriate participation in related discussion forums to your toolbox for building great quality links back to your website

James Orr is a professional real estate investor and marketing expert.

He runs over 300 websites including a marketing blog about holding your marketing ruthlessly accountable to results at http://RuthlessAccountability.com