Obviously posting on forums and including links back to your site in the signature will bring in some traffic, but do those links have any bearing on SEO? Thanks! Kirsty
To be honest i elarned early on that signatures on sites with relevent content to your business path were like a gold mine of inbound links. With google and yahoo, both altering their algorythms to more heavilly weight inbound links this seemed like a "best practice" behavior. Some good rules too keep in mind: Make sure your signature contains a keyword you wish to be found relavent on. Make sure the signature is used on forums with relevent content to your site. Alter the signature on different forums to tailor the content relevence. And above all, dont spam messages to peoples forums just to get signature links, you'll be removed promptly, and your efforts will be far more appreciated by your fellow forum mates. Post good quality responses to forum topics, and your sure to both get great inbound links, as well as make a few friends!
a new trend on some boards have the rel nofollow attribute and will give you no credit. links on this forum will get your spidered instantly...
Kirsty, they have a small positive effect. The approach is to have links back from several relevant forums. My suspicion is that post Jagger they have been down graded by Google. Nice site by the way. I have a travel industry blog at : http://travelthinking.blogspot.com
What other said is right. I agree with them. One more point - Traffic itself also plays a big roll in ranking. Traffic is directly proportional to ranking and vice versa.
I agree to this people. Signatures in forum post does not only give you traffic but also gives your site more visibility to possible clients/visitors from people in the forum.
the most important about signature on the forum to get traffic is not just a plain link. you should make them eye catching and give some decription words. and don't forget about reading rules about sig
Does anyone know how I could find relevent forums for my content? I tried google but only come up with a few with low traffic. Also is there anyway to determine a forums traffic? Mark
Depends on the SE. Google doesnt seem to give much importance to them... especially if all of them are coming from the same forum. But these links can get your site indexed pretty quick. On the other hand , MSN seems to love them. As compared to Google, MSN is very poor at judging the content relevancy of a site and can be manipulated by using keywords in the anchor text of these links.
Mark, try finding forums with (your main keyword) + forum (or forums) on google, alltheweb, yahoo and msn.
If nothing else they do seem to help a site get spidered. However I do think Yahoo and MSN like signature links.
I haven't really experienced much traffic posting in forums. For the most part I get more traffic from posting comments in other blogs. Forum posts remain pretty static whereas comments on other sites may get hit by a large number of unique visitors.