One method I am starting to use in an effort to drive more traffic to my site, improve it’s page ranking in Google and also improve it’s position in the search listings is participation within various Forums. (You did know that Page Rank is not the same as your position in search listings didn’t you? Ahh a topic for another post I think)
I have registered to a couple of Forums related to the content of my website where I can place a url to my website as part of the signature. The idea of this is that each time I post on the Forum a link is set up back to my site. I have picked a couple of Forums initially that rank well in Google and are relevant to what my site is about, since Google rates each link on the relevance and where the link is coming from.
However it’s not a question of posting as many times as you can on the Forum (apart from the fact you’re likely to get barred from the forum if the posts are irrelevant), since if you overdo it and have too many links back to your site from the same place Google is just as likely to downgrade the rating of those links. There is another trade off as well – TIME! Whilst you’re participating in the Forums, you not doing any “real” work and earning money.
So the question is how do you know when you’ve overdone it on one particular Forum and what to do about it? Haven’t got a definite answer to the first one at the moment. As for the second question, well time to find a different Forum – that’s still relevant and ranks well with Google. Course if you like the original Forum you can continue to post on there, but perhaps remove the url from your signature?!?
Obviously I will now have to keep an eye on my traffic stats to see if I can measure how effective my time spent on the Forums is being!
Forum Life……
I’ve never really been in to posting on Forums before, I’ve used them to find an answer to a technical problem but that’s about it. So posting is new to me. What I’m finding is that it is quite enjoyable, you can get involved in some quite interesting debates (not necessarily related to your field of expertise) – and you don’t have to be the definitive expert on the subject matter to post (which is what always put me off in the past) – just got to me careful that all you end doing is living on Forums!
Of course one thing you need to select for your Forum is an Avatar, so being a huge fan of Family Guy and not actually knowing anyone on any of the forums I picked the following for my Avatar:
Family Guy
More later…..
Neil
