Anchor text, forums and other ramblings

Saturday, March 21st, 2009 at 9:18 am

Anchor text used properly can help your ranking in the search engines. Linking to your post with the appropriate text makes a difference but somehow people tend to ignore that in forums.

Now a good friend of mine runs a forum and it has a section for New blog ramblings. I have purposely not linked to it because the section is for active members and I don’t want to see a bunch of people go spam it.

The thing is that this a perfect place to highlight your quality content posts, expose them to people that may not find your blog normally and send them to some of your good quality posts. You also create a back link from a very active forum that has some decent PR.

Really an ideal thing and something a lot of the forum member’s miss out on. The key is to not add all your posts but do add the posts that have good content. In this Web 2.0 world giving first and with quality content is important.

Here is the problem I am seeing though. More people are starting to use this and that is great but they are missing the opportunity the forum gives them to create the ideal anchor text for their content.

They either come in and put up a blurb and the direct link to their blog’s home page or the just post the permalink to their blog post. the latter is better because you will be getting internal links and not just a link to your home page but not as powerful as having a link with your keyword phrase as the anchor text.

Most forum use bb code so it would be very easy to use it and make a clickable link (anchor text) with their keyword for the post.

For those not familiar with bb code this is easily done by using the following

[url=http://yourblogpostfullurl]Anchor text[/url]

By doing that and adding the keyword they most want to rank for they are telling the serps exactly what the post is about and the little spiders that go through there will report back and hopefully you will rank better for that specific term.

Yes using forums will deliver direct traffic done the other way but taking a few more moments and alerting the serps to what your post is about is even more powerful.

Take advantage of these opportunities not just in forums but anywhere that you can promote your post and use good anchor text.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold