Many people overlook the power of forum link building  but it has a lot of benefits and is a great way to get targeted traffic while building backlinks. I say the only down fall is that it can be very time consuming to do this right!

There is definitely no shortage of niche forums – you can find a forum in practically any subject you can think of these days!

You can instantly build a good reputation in these communities and reach out to your prospects with just a few forum posts and a very enticing signature that shows them the links to your website.

Remember to start off slow when jumping into a conversation at these forums because the advocates in the group will notice your trying to sell something from the start! It’s important to be discreet and find some common ground with people!

You don’t want to bust onto the scene, spamming the threads with a lot of “me, too!” responses, because it won’t be long before you find yourself banned or simply ignored.

Be helpful, share tips, resources and information, and approach forum link building in a similar way that you would approach social networking, by offering help and slowly building awareness of your brand.

To search for forums in your niche market just do a Google search for the name of your niche  + forums. E.g. “Dog Training Forums”. Just replace “dog training” with your main keyword and dozens of forums will pop up for your niche!

When creating your signature box, be sure to feature a free report or resource to entice people to click your link in the same way that you would create your article marketing resource boxes. Include your keywords in the anchor text of your link.

The easiest way to direct traffic to your website from a forum is by offering something of value, at no cost.

Focus on building a list of active subscribers that you can follow up with in the future with both free content, balanced out with promotional offers.

Ideally you should participate in forum link building in conjunction with other types of link building e.g. article marketing, directory submission, press releases, social bookmarking and so on.

Getting lots of high quality links to your website is essential for a good search engine rank, especially if you are targetting competitive keyword phrases.

Most people concentrate on getting links to their home page (index page), but it is good practise to also get some deep links.

So, what is deep linking? A deep link is simply a link to a page on your website that is not your home page. It could be a link to a product page, a link to your blog or a specific blog post, or a link to another internal page on your website.

Getting a mixture of links to your home page and to other pages on your website looks much more natural than just getting link to your home page and it will also help you to get a better ranking for your internal pages as well as your home page. For these reasons it is essential to include deep linking as part of your overall SEO strategy.

Here are some ways that you can get deep links:

1. Use social bookmarking services to bookmark internal pages or blog posts on your website. Many bookmarking service will provide you with a do follow link back to your site and you can easily bookmark a page to multiple services at the same time by using a service such as OnlyWire.com
2. Link Internally within your site or blog – make sure you have a good navigation system within your website. This can include site menus and also linking back to internal pages from your home page or from other pages and blog posts where relevant.
3. Include a deep link in your author resource box when distributing articles. I like to include 2 or 3 links in my author resource box when I distribute an article. I usually include a link to my home page + one or two deep links to internal pages on my website.
4. Use deep linking in your blog comments. When you leave a comment on someones blog consider using a deep link rather than your home page link. It may be appropiate here to leave a link to your blog or a relevant blog post.
5. Exchange links with other webmasters or bloggers and ask them to link to one of your internal pages rather than a home page.
6. Use deep links in forums. Most links allow you to have one or more links to your website in your forum signature. You don’t have to link directly to your home page – you could link to another relevant internal page on your website. You could also include a link to a relevant page in a forum post, but be careful not to spam.
7. Paid Directory Submissions – some directories allow you to include deep links. However, these are usually restricted to paid submissions.

Hopefully this answers the question what is deep linking and gives you a few ideas of how you can get deep links to your own website.

Get more tips for improving your search engine rank in my SEO Ebook

Building good quality backlinks is essential if you want to push your website higher in the search engine results.

A backlink is a link to your website and counts as a “vote” of confidence towards your site. The more important the site that is linking to you, the higher the weight of your backlink.

One of the best and easiest ways to get backlinks is by writing articles for SEO.

If you are not a writer, don’t panic… you don’t have to be a professional writer to benefit from this technique. You just need to be able to write 400-500 words on the topic of the website that you are promoting. If you can’t do this, then you can easily get some articles written for you for around $10 an article.

The main benefit of writing articles for SEO is that you can add an author resource box to the end of your article and include 2-3 links back to your website. Some article directories also support HTML and allow you to include your keywords in the link text (anchor text) as well. There are thousands of article directories on the internet but from my experience the best ones are:

• http://www.ezinearticles.com
• http://www.goarticles.com
• http://www.articledashboard.com
• http://www.ideamarketers.com
• http://www.searchwarp.com

If you don’t have much time available just submit your article to the above 5 directories and you will benefit from good backlinks and visitors.

If you want to speed up your article submission and submit your article to a wide range of article directories and ezine owners, you may want to consider using an article submission service or software.

If you write articles for SEO on a regular basis you will see a noticable difference in your search engine rank and you will also get the benefit of branding your own name, company name and website.

You have probably already heard of reciprocal linking, where two websites link to each other for mutual benefit, but what about three way linking?

Three way linking can easily be explained in the example below:

You have three websites – website A, website B and website C.

• Website A links to website B.
• Website B links to website C
• Website C links to website A

As you can see, there is no direct reciprocal link here. Each website is linking to another website, but getting a link back from a different website.

The reason for doing this is because reciprocal links can easily be detected by search engines as “unnatural” links, therefore you won’t get as much benefit from a reciprocal link as you will from a one way link. Doing a three way link exchange makes this look more natural as site A is linking to site B, but getting a link back from site C.

If you decide to use three way linking as a strategy for link building I would recommend only linking to websites that are related to your own website and ensuring that your backlink is coming from a site that is also related. By related, I mean the same theme. So don’t link your home business website to someone’s dieting website.

How do you set up a three way link?

It is easy to set up a three way link if you already have two or more related websites of your own. You can email a webmaster and propose a 3 way link exchange. The disadvantage of this is that it is a manual process and it can be difficult to keep track of your links and be sure that the other webmaster has kept his or her link to your website in place.

Another strategy is to use a three way linking service such as 3 Way Links. This service allows you to automatically set up three way links with other websites. All websites are manually reviewed so you don’t need to worry about linking to bad neighborhoods.

Three way linking is definitely a strategy that you should consider using as part of your overall linking campaign along with other methods such as article distribution, forum posting, directory submission and press releases.

Visit 3 Way Links for more information.

If you are trying to get a higher search engine ranking, you will probably have come across the term “Google Pagerank” or “Google PR” while you have been doing your research. If you are not sure what page rank is or how it can affect your search engine rank, read on for an easy to understand explanation of Google Page Rank and how to get a page rank.

In simple terms a page rank is an indicator of the quality of a particular page on website. By quality I mean the number of links that the web page has pointing to it rather than the actual quality of the content on the page.

A page rank is a whole number from 0 – 10, where 10 is the highest quality and 0 is the lowest. To find out the page rank of a particular page you need to download and install the Google Toolbar which is free. Page Rank applies to a page on a website, not to the whole website.

If the toolbar is grey, this means that a page has no page rank. If your website has pages on it that have a grey toolbar this could mean that

• The page is very new and has not yet been indexed by Google OR
• The page contains duplicate content and is in Google’s supplemental index rather than its main index OR
• Your website has been de-indexed/dropped from Google for some violation (less likely

If the toolbar is white, this means you have a page rank of zero. A PR0 is very common for a new website or a new web page as it take some time to build enough links back to your website to achive a higher page rank. It is also worth noting that Google typically only updates the page rank on the toolbar every few months so if you have a new website it may take  months for page rank to show on the toolbar for your website. However, Google is always updating the page rank of sites on an ongoing basis, so the page rank shown on the toolbar is not a true pagerank, it is a snapshot of your page rank from a given time.

To increase your page rank you need to get high quality backlinks to your website. A backlink is simply a link from another website to your own site. The best way is to get links naturally by writing such good content that other webmaster’s want to link to your website, but in reality most webmasters build backlinks by distributing articles, submitting their website to directories, exchanging links, distributing press releases, commenting on blogs and more. You can find out exactly how to increase your page rank here.

It is not just the number of backlinks to your site that count towards page rank, it is also the quality of these links. So for example, a link from a PR6 page is will increase your chances of getting a higher page rank, more than say, a link from a PR4 page. The number of links on the page that is linking to you also affects how much page rank (also known as “link juice”) is passed on to your web page. A link from a page that has 5 other links on it is of more value than a link from a page with 40 links on it.

Page rank is not linear, so it is much more difficult to get from say a PR4 to a PR5 than it is to get from a PR0 to a PR3.

Google Page Rank plays an important part in how a web page is ranked in Google’s search engine results but it isn’t worth much if you haven’t researched your keywords and optimized your web page. Page rank is a useful indicator of how popular a website is, but it is only part of the equation. So, do take notice of your website’s page rank, but don’t get hung up on that little green bar. The most important thing is that your traffic is increasing, not your page rank.