Forum Links

You can go round the forums, anything and everything even remotely related to your site's theme, and get links from the profiles you can set up and including your site url in your signature. The code should look like

[url="http://www.example.com"]Examples Ahoy![/url]

If you do it just like that, then you'll have a link to the site saying Examples Ahoy! in the anchor text. Obviously you can vary that to include whatever you want in different forums.

This is what I call grunt work. I can do it or you could do it but I'm expensive and you'll be busy so here is really where you need a tame 14-year-old who'll go round the forums signing up to them and getting the profiles set up. That's stage one.

Stage two is where you yourself or someone knowledgable goes round the forums leaving interesting comments. This creates more links. The thing here is it can't be just anyone who does this, it has to be someone who can genuinely understand the ongoing discussions and can make relevant observations. If you can do this, then it will generate site visits and obviously the more people visit the site and link to it themselves the more natural backlinks you'll accumulate.

The backlinks from the forums will very probably be nofollowed. This is a tag Google introduced to cut down spamming. What it means is that you won't, for now, be getting link juice, Page Rank credit, for links you get like this. It doesn't matter as the point of the exercise is to get backlinks from the people who visit your site as a consequence of reading your comments.

It's also a very good idea from your point of view to give the forums what they're looking for, namely, quality content. It helps them to rank. That means that instead of flushing your details from their servers every six months or so to clear them of comment spam etc. they'll want to keep your content together with your back link, so helping them to rank in turn helps you to rank.

Why it's worthwhile bothering to have something related to your site as your anchor text is that nofollow is increasingly being abandoned in favour of plain unadulterated links in blogs as it's being understood that the most articulate and interesting individuals will leave comments where it does them the most good. Inevitably this will spread across the forums too for the same reason. That should mean that existing links will suddenly start to have an influence over the search results. This is the philosophy I'm adopting for my own sites and I suggest you do the same.