One of the best ways to increase your traffic is of course the «Forum way» as I like to call this concept.

First of all lets get straight what are forums all about. Forums in general (and we are talking about internet) are websites with a directory look and feeling. I categorize them in three basic categories:

• Forums with a specific subject and a group of people open a discussion around it. For example o forum about Web servers. These are small to medium traffic sites in general.
• Forums with a topic and various discussions around a big field. For example a forum around programming covering c, c++, matlab, fortran and more languages. These are small to big traffic sites in generals.
• Forums with lots of topics and various discussions around a big field. For example a forum around web servers, programming languages and search engines. These are big traffic sites.

The above were some infos about forums which I believe that you should know by the time being but I wrote this paragraph just in case.

Traffic Investigation:

Now lets start our investigation in how to increase our traffic with them with this question: Which are the forums which people search the most in internet? And we need to know this because more searches means more people looking for a specific discussion means more people are going to get in touch with us, just a logical assumption. After a comprehensive search with Overture, Miva and 7search with IBP9 (we are covering this in another article) I found that people looking and stats are:

I dont give results under 100 searches, pointless.

I provide also the link of the top site and the PR of it to have a complete view and if you like after this article to sign up in them, that’s a good start.

The above list should be multiplied by 2.5 to be more precise (don’t mind how do I know this just take my word for granted). So we see even for the keyword with the most searches «forum» we have approximately 3500 searches per month. Now if we take in mind that the people who actually hit the specific link in the search engines, 80% of them, we see that the traffic that the top link expects is approximately again 2500 unique per month. That’s too bad for us, because we cant expect to earn traffic from a site that it doesn’t have in the first place. Correct? Wrong very wrong indeed. The above stats are from people looking exactly for forums, someone who is looking infos about web servers is not going to search in Google with the word web server forum but only with the word web server or web server infos or latest web servers or web server news and so on. That is what is happening and you shouldn’t put aside the «Forum way» concept for the above reason. Furthermore the most forums are connected as subtopic of any kind of website you can imagine. I have seen sites that more than 80% of their traffic was from the forum and not from their content and the forum was a subcategory. Every one nowadays with a well designed and serious website has installed a similar topic forum to keep his visitors from leaving. If we take in mind also that exists forum ready scripts around internet isn’t hard at all to create one (down further ill provide you with a link to a site like this). So you can expect for a big traffic if you play the game well and don’t leave because of overture results etc.

The traffic way:

After the forum traffic case study, we must know what we should do in order to achieve our goal. Well first of all you should find out some top notch forums and sign up in them in order to become members. I provide you with the ones I believe that you can benefit the most below:

• Digital Point Forums Top of the tops.
• Webmaster World Requires subscribe.
• Sexy And Funny Will send you some good traffic.
• Board Freeones Lots of people in here.
• Abestweb Affiliate discussions.
• Web Host Directory Internet related subjects.
• Iwebtool Talk Webmaster discussions, tools and resources.
• Ozzu Seo, programming, hosting, marketing and more.
• If you want to suggest one please contact webmaster.

The log in process is really easy, all you have to do is an email. After you verify your account with the email you can start posting some topics or answer in some question in it. Take in mind that you should not spam, posting irrelevant answer, or post link to your site directly this is forbidden in the majority of forums and so one because you are going to get banned or your posts are going to be erased. Make some really simple but comprehensive posts wherever you thing you can. The question that lies ahead now is: Ok I did the post what do I earn? And that’s the whole point that this article is about. You get to earn your signature, bingo!
Whats the signature thing? Every post after you have signed up and logged in has a specific place for every user named control panel. There you will see a field named Edit Signature. You can go there and as a signature you can put in your domain link, put in up to 3 links no more, so every time you post something under the post your link will appear! Take in mind that some forums require to post a number of topics approximately 20-30 to apply your signature or some time before they apply it approximately a week, but this are really not a problem for you indeed.

Now after you have create your signature you must post some topics, go and post in ones that exists for a long time and they have big number for views and answers, this topics they will never be erased and your signature will stay in this post for as long as you like. I say that because post with small traffic either the are erased or they are so down in the list that no one except you are going to see your signature.

With this you will have some good traffic in the begging for your site and imagine what you will achieve if you post in a medium number of forums.
But the better part is yet to come! The biggest idea behind this is not really the traffic that you earn, but:

• The increase in your Alexa, Google ranking because you have links in other sites pointing to your domain. Well Alexa increase as a result of this.
• The increase of your Backlinks as well for the same reason.
• The speed up of your sites indexing by the search engines. How come? Because forums are loved by the spiders and they crawl them regularly so after a small period of time you are going to be seen by Google and other engines.
• You can choose the title of the link back to your site, a big seo variable!

Were do I find a ready made forum script for my site?:

You can visit this website here Php bb2 its really easy to install the script. I hope to cover this topic in a whole article.

The conclusion:

As a conclusion Forums have lots of traffic you can use, you can find a forum for any topic really and not only will give traffic but good rankings as well, lot of Backlinks and a quicker indexing by engines.