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Understanding Forum Backlinks

First things first, I have to clarify here that when I say forum backlinks, I am talking about the backlinks you get from forum profile pages and not the backlinks you get from signatures when posting on forums. Although, some of the tips here will be about signature backlinks too, so pay attention;-).

In short, this article is going to be about how to properly make profiles on forums (so you don’t waste your time for nothing), how these backlinks benefit your SERP, what can be done to get the most out of them and finally i am going to share with you a list of more than 1500 DOFOLLOW forums and online communities where you can register and put anchored keywords on your profile page. You can do this manually or you can use a software.

How Useful are These Backlinks?

Well if you know anything about SEO you will know by now that these backlinks don’t have much weight on their own. This is about the QUANTITY we’re talking about and not the quality of your backlinks. Truth is, quantity of backlinks is also an EXTREMELY IMPORTANT PART OF SEO, especially if they are ONE WAY backlinks like the ones you can get from forum profile, so don’t neglect it by any means. You already know that google sees the links to your sites as votes right? Well, Google and especially Yahoo and Bing, like to see that you are getting these “votes” from various domains, they give your site an overall authority boost and eventually it makes it easier for your site to be ranked on first page on Google for the keywords you choose.

What many tend to forget here is that in order to get the most or anything at all from forum profile pages, those pages need to be indexed. And naturally, in order to get them indexed you have to give search engines a reason to do so. This is where many failed and never really got the chance to find out how truly useful forum profile backlinks can be.

Making a Profile Page and Customizing it

This is the main reason why i am making this article.
What people usually do is to just leave their links (sometimes not even anchored), and they think that is enough. The fact is, they couldn’t be more wrong. Think about it, what have you provided to the search engines? An empty page with one or two anchored keywords? Is that how posts on your blogs look like? Is that how your articles look like when you submit them to article directories? Is that how you make a url for your pages/articles? Of course not, otherwise your blog wouldn’t even get indexed most of the time. Don’t think its any different with profile pages

“Content is king”? – Put some content on your profile page then.
“Url is very important for SERP” ? – So why don’t you put some keyword(s) as your username so the url ends with them.

Ok, so let’s get started now when we have analyzed main problems with poor profile pages.

1. Pick Your Username Carefully

- It’s always a good thing for serp that your URL has some connection with your content because then your content (and your anchored backlink) will gain some more weight. Be careful though not to put something overly spammy as forum owners may delete it. For example, if your preferred keyword is “Dog trainer” don’t make the mistake to put that as your username. I will use “mad_dog” as username here for testing purposes.

2. Fill out “About me” Field

- This is where you should write as much as you can about anything that can be related to your keywords, however, try to make it look as genuine as possible. For the above keyword you could start with:

- “Hi, my name is… i am a professional dog trainer (dog trainer anchored)… “

Treat this like it is any other article you would submit to Ezinearticles or other article directories. Best thing about it is that it is you who decides where you will be putting your backlinks, which means that you can put them in the very first sentence where they carry much more weight than in the author boxes for example. Also, it is you who decides how many backlinks you want to put in your profile so you can use these profiles to link back to some of your other posts/pages/articles that are not yet indexed. As you can see, link wheels possibilities are endless here:).

Important: Many forums have settings where you have to choose if your profile is going to be public or not. Be sure to make them public from drop down menu so that they are visible to everyone, including search engines.

3. Your Interests

- DO NOT skip this field! A big percentage of forums I’m going to share with you have this field so be sure to fill it. Whatever you put as your interest will act as a tag, which means that pages from these forums with the same tags will link back to your profile page. This itself should not only secure indexation of your profile page if you put enough tags, but it may also get your profile page some page rank in future. However, do not put in too many tags or the forum owners might see you as a spammer. 5-6 should be more than enough.

Again, like in the previous step, make sure that you make this field public.

4. Check Your Public Profile

- After you have saved your profile you should check if everything is correct and if your backlinks are valid. Click on them to make sure they are linked to your blog.

5. Write Down Your Links

- After you’ve made each profile, write down the URLs in a notepad as you will need those URLs for the last tip in this article.

Just some side notes here: It would be a good idea to wait for a few days after you have registered your profile before you start editing it and filing it with content and keywords. Again, this is where lazy profile makers make a mistake. They usually put a link to their site as soon as they register and they risk being banned by forum owners almost immediately. It’s no wonder why many aren’t able to fully capitalize on the power of forum profiles, because either their profiles have been banned by forum owner or they get sandboxed by search engines.

Pinging and RSS Directory Submission

Now it’s time to tell the search engines about our new pages. First, you should PING all those URL’s you wrote down in a notepad for faster indexation. For that, you can use pingdevice.com service for free. The difference with other pinging services is that with this one you can submit as many links as you want AT ONCE!

After that, you should go to Hostmyrss to make one master Rss feed out of all your URLs for free. You can then put that master feed into feed directories all around the net like I hope you would with other feeds you have. Rss feeds are one of the best ways for deep-linking and of course they can boost your traffic or earn you some money trough adsense for feeds (I’ll cover more on the importance of feeds some other time).

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