There may be a number of blogs and discussion forums related to a company’s product category. Participating in such blogs and forums meaningfully, with the objective of helping others and sharing information, can help in improving a company’s online presence and SEO. A company should aim to engage blog authors and people commenting on blogs by clarifying areas of doubt, by providing valuable resources, and by positioning themselves as subject matter experts. For this, the person or team involved in these activities should be subject matter experts themselves. If the target audience that visits these blogs recognizes the company as being experts, then they will want to interact with the company on their own. This interaction may be in the form of a website visit, a personal message on a discussion forum, an email, or a phone call. They may also provide links to a company’s website pages in other forums if they find the information useful after visiting them. This will help in gaining natural backlinks to a company’s website—the kind most favored by search engines.
The company must ensure that its contact details and website link are visible or accessible to other readers. This is generally achieved by adding these details to the signature of a post or mentioning them in the user profile. Such links in the signature also contribute to a website’s SEO. However, many of the reputed and popular discussion forums allow such backlinks only to those forum users who have gained a specific level of respect and trust in the forum. Those users who have been on a forum for a long period of time, who have posted several times, and who have gained noted support and appreciation from others in the forum, are often permitted to post links in their forum entries or signatures. Therefore, it is important that the company post to the forum regularly.
A company may also write high-quality guest blog posts and submit them to reputed blogs for publishing. Such guest blog posts, once accepted, can be valuable for attracting readers of the reputed blogs to the company’s website, and can also improve the search rank of the website if links to the website are present in the guest blog posts. However, it is generally not easy to get reputed blogs to accept a company’s guest blog because they have high standards for accepting guest posts, or may only accept very few guest posts in a particular time period. Thus, the company should be persistent in its efforts and ensure that all guest blog posts that are submitted are well written and targeted to the audience of the reputed blogs.
Care should be taken not to hard-sell one’s product, and the company should avoid inserting links to its website for the sake of earning backlinks—most of the good blogs and discussion forums are moderated, and such links would most likely be deleted. In addition, irrelevant link sharing or hard-selling may damage a company’s reputation without earning any benefits. Sharing links on blogs and discussion forums that are not related to one’s product category or website may result in penalties from search engines in terms of a company’s search rank. Search engines are becoming increasingly more sophisticated at identifying links that do not add value as well as those that are present for the sole purpose of earning backlinks.
