The Beginner’s Guide to Forum Posting: A Fast and Easy Way to Get Backlinks

If you’re a beginner who is just getting into SEO, or you need that “extra push” to help get your website to the top of the search engines, one of the fastest and easiest ways is through forum posting. Forum posting is the process of interacting with the other members of the forum until you have earned the right to promote your website with a link that appears beneath your posts called a “signature.” The reason why forum posting is easy, fast, and effective is because forum guidelines are usually not that strict, forums get crawled often by the search engines, and it takes about 10 to 30 seconds to post a reply. After doing forum posting for about a month, here is a fast and easy way to get signature backlinks that will help increase your rankings in the SERPs.

Step 1 – Find a forum

You can find a forum simply by going to a search engine like Google and typing in your keyword + “forum” or if you want to be more specific, you can type in your keyword + “powered by vbulletin” and it will display forums within that niche that are powered by vBulletin. Another way is to just go into the forum of your niche and either search for a list of related forums in the search bar or ask other members of the forum who are usually more than willing to help out. To start out, here is a list of forums related to website promotion that I’ve used. I’ve manually checked each forum’s page rank (PR) so that you know they are forums that have a good reputation and been established on the internet for awhile.

• warriorforum.com PR5
• websitebabble.com PR5
• mycyberquest.com PR4
• netbuilders.org PR4
• webcosmoforums.com PR4
• webtalkforums.com PR4
• imtalk.org PR3
• lovingtech.net PR3
• moneyfanclub.com PR3
• webmasterground.com PR2

Step 2 – Register for a forum

This is the easiest step. Just register and provide the relevant information that they want such as a your username, password, and date of birth. You will usually have to enter a CAPTCHA just so they make sure you’re not a spam bot. Finally, provide an email address and then register. They will send an activation email to your inbox. Click the link and you will be registered to the forum.

Step 3 – Check signature requirement

You’re going to need to post a number of times to get a signature. Forums do this to prevent people to just walk in and walk out, and if you go into the forum asking how many posts it takes to get a signature, you might get a few raised eyebrows. But all of this can be avoided through doing either one of two things. Search for the forums “Rules” and it will tell you about the guidelines for how many posts it will take to get a signature. If you don’t see it, type the word “signature” in the search box. You should see a bunch of threads of people in the past asking how many posts it takes to get a signature. From my experience, it usually ranges between a minimum of 10 posts to a maximum of 50 posts.

Step 4 – Start replying to posts

Once you find out how many posts you need, start posting. I usually start out in the introduction section and introduce myself, just to see if I can even post in the first place (some moderators have to approve your first posts for them to appear). Then I just look for posts and answer people’s questions. Make sure you don’t leave any spam comments like “yeah I agree” or “Good job!” You will get kicked out of the forum pretty fast. Just do your best to contribute your ideas to others or help them out with their problems.

Step 5 – Create your signature

Once you reach the desired amount of posts, go to “Settings” or “User CP” (it should be somewhere on top of the page). Then search for “Edit Signature” (it should appear on the left hand side of the page, but sometimes you’ll need to log out and log back in for it to appear). Then type in your signature backlink. You’ll need to know how to use BBCode for most of the forums, but it’s very easy. All you need to do is type in [url=(insert your URL here without the parenthesis)]insert your keyword here[/url]. Press save and that’s it!

Step 6 – Verify your signature

Post again in the forum to test if your signature appears. If it does then congratulations. You’ve made a backlink signature. I’d recommend continuing to reply to posts to build more pages so that Google notices your signature, especially if you happen to post in hot threads. Each time you reply after you obtain your signature is another backlink to your website.

So that’s all it really takes. However, before you go, I just wanted to give you some final words of advice. Try not to see forum posting as a way to just get backlinks or the process will begin to feel like tedious grunt work. Instead, see it as an opportunity to develop relationships with other people, share thoughts, and learn from experts who have been there for awhile. If you make it a habit to get just one signature a day, at the end of the month, you’ll have 30 powerful backlinks that you can use over and over again to help promote your website in the SERPs. Now go out there and post!

Tagged as: backlinks, digitalpoint, forum posting, forums, interacting, marketing, phpbb, SEO, signature, vBulletin, warrior forums