Linkbuilding With Niche Forums
Getting incoming links to your website has always been an important part of search engine optimization. When another site links to your site it is like getting a vote from someone else. Now it is not all votes that count and all votes don’t carry the same “voting power” so in order to get links that matter, there are a few things you’ll need to be aware of.
One of these things is to have the links come from relevant sites. Votes from sites that are not even remotely related to your site will not carry any voting power of value. Time spent on getting links of little or no value is time WASTED.
There are many ways to get links from related sites but today I would like to discuss forums with you. As you might already know there are many forums that will give you the option to not only insert links into your posts but also to have one or more links in your signature.
Some forums use nofollow tags on outgoing links which means that the links don’t send the search engine spiders your way. A link with a nofollow tag will not count as a vote. Does this mean that you shouldn’t place signatures in forums with nofollow or that you shouldn’t use those forums at all?
My take on this is that if the forum is using nofollow and is off topic (not related to your site) then “YES”. Don’t waste your time on things that doesn’t matter. However if the forum is on topic (related) then I suggest that you use it even though they use a nofollow tag.
Topic related forums will be read by many of the same people that you want to have as visitors and customers on your site. Having a link in your signature when posting comments in that forum might send that reader to your site. Readers are not affected by “nofollow”. 
The big question is: Where do you find those topic specific forums?
Some time ago I came by a site called Big Boards. It is a collection of forums and message boards divided into niches and subcategories. But besides the categories is has a few other great features:
- What forum software is used
- Language used in the forum
- Description of the site
- Statistics on posts and more
- The total amount of posts and members
This means that you don’t even have to visit the forum to find the ones that are suitable for you. If you only speak and write English you might not want to visit a Hungarian forum anyway.
I would like to encourage you to visit Big Boards if you’re looking to get more relevant links and more targeted visitors to your site.
A final tip in order for you to make this into a success: Be sure to post great and helpful content in those forums. If you just spam the forums with “good read” comments you’ll likely get banned and at the same time ruin your name in the industry. Don’t do that!! Useful content will send visitors back to your site for more.
Good linking,
Mikael
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What a great link – That makes the job a lot easier.
Thanks for the link Mikael. It’s a great help in finding good and relevant forums to place a link on.
Danke schön