Social media concepts have enabled many websites to allow interaction from site visitors. The ability to leave comments, participate in discussions and swap internet stories with like-minded people has produced many opportunities to create a strong internet profile for you across the world wide web – all with links attached.

1. Participate in online forums / bulletin boards.

Most online forums or bulletin boards include a ‘signature’ function, allowing you to customise the text to appear at the bottom of each of your posts, in much the same way as email programs often do. By including text links to your website in your online signature, you are effectively creating a valuable inbound link every time you post a response. It is important to regularly spend a little time interacting and posting on the boards, but the networking benefits as well as the additional links can be highly valuable with just half an hour a day.

Of course, it is important to participate in a forum that is relevant to your industry or field, and there are online communities for virtually any subject you could think of. A useful list of over 2000 forum / bulletin board communities can be found at http://www.big-boards.com/.

Just be aware that bulletin boards, just like anything else on the internet, will ban you from participating if you are considered to be ‘spamming’ the site. That is, don’t create posts that simply advertise your business, or systematically leave lots of posts that say virtually nothing, just to display the signature. Most forums do not allow this in their guidelines. Keep a simple, relevant text link in your signature and use your posts to join the general discussions naturally with pertinent and relevant comments.

2. Read and Comment on Blogs

Blogs rely on generating comments from readers to perpetuate discussion and provide feedback. Most blog comment systems allow the commenter to turn their username into a text link to their website.

By spending half an hour each day searching your favourite blogs in your interest field and leaving comments, you are creating more valuable links. Of course, this daily 30 minutes also involves reading news and information relevant to your field, so the time is never wasted.

Some blogs do handicap comment links with a ‘no-follow’ tag which removes the relevance of the link for search engines. This is to reduce spamming behaviour. Many blogs do still allow unrestricted links, but do be cautious, as in the previous example, not to spam the blog and always make insightful comments that contribute to the conversation.

A couple of useful blog directories are Blogcatalog and MyBlogLog.

3. Social Bookmarking

There are many social bookmarking websites available now, including Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, and more. By participating in these websites on a regular basis, your profile will become known and recognised by hundreds of people interested in the same topics as you.

Develop the habit of submitting interesting and relevant articles you have discovered to your chosen social bookmarking sites. As your reputation grows, people will be more inclined to read and respond to whatever you submit, even if those articles belong to your own website!

Each time you submit an article from your website to a social bookmarking site, it produces more links and can potentially drive large amounts of traffic in a short period of time.

There is some skill in choosing the best material to submit to each community, as members are able to vote items up or down, so be sure to avoid spamming the community with poorly written items.

If you are lucky enough for one of your submissions to go ‘hot’, the additional traffic can produce further links that can improve your site ranking as well as traffic.

Content is King

Of course, for any of these strategies to work, the content of your website still has to be informative, original and eye-catching. No amount of links from forum signatures will make a website successful if, when people visit, the content does not encourage them to read and respond.

A balance needs to be struck between the above strategies and those suggested in the first part of this article to not only provide as many avenues as possible for people to find you, but to provide the best customer experience when they arrive.

Netregistry is committed to developing the best content strategies available to help every business manage this balance with practical content solutions. For more information on how Netregistry can work with you on link acquisition and quality content, visit our online marketing page or call 1800 00 15 60.

About the Author

Jonathan Crossfield is the Online Editor and Copywriter for Netregistry's Marketing Department and a regular contributor to Nett Magazine. If you would like Jonathan to write vibrant, fresh content for your website or marketing campaigns, enquire about Netregistry's Copywriting services.

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