SEO Benefits Of Adding Discussion Forum To Your Website

One of the important search engine concepts that is frequently recommended to improve your website’s ranking is adding fresh content to your website. Webmasters use a number of ways to add fresh content to their websites and one of the methods of adding fresh content to websites is by adding discussion forums to websites. There are number of SEO benefits to adding a discussion forum to your website.

Many companies use message boards or online discussion forums to interact with their customers. Customers will be able to post their questions and concerns in the company’s discussion forums and the company staff or designated individuals will respond to customers’ questions and concerns. At one level, online forums are used as customer support platform. At another level certain sections of your online forum can be opened up for open discussions and debates on your industry related topics. However, maintaining such open forums and discussion boards involves its own challenges especially in terms of keeping the forum clean and useful for the users. Open forums are often plagued by spammers. So you may have tough time keeping the spammers away.

Nonetheless the SEO benefits are numerous and it is worth taking the trouble. Your forums will turnout to be rich source of keyword rich and contextual content. All the questions and the discussions will be revolving around your niche. Active forums will add loads of fresh content to your website. However, remember to integrate your forum to your website. To keep the spammers away from your forum make use of ‘no follow’ attribute so that those who want to post in your forum just for the sake of back links will be discouraged.
If you have noticed, many a times when you search the internet using a question as the search term, you will get number of forums listed in the search results. This will work well for your website too. This will attract a considerable amount of targeted traffic to your website. Also, you will be able to use your online forum to build positive reputation. You can post several threads in your forum to the effect of creating a positive image about your brand and services. Added to that, you will also be able to project yourself an authority figure by discussing on various industry related topics giving apt solutions to your niche related problems. When internet users come across your solutions, they will get a positive image about your brand and our capabilities. You can bank on this positive image in times of reputation crisis.

As you can see, adding online forums bring a number of benefits to your website. You get fresh content to your website, get targeted traffic to your website, project authority figure image in the industry and more. Above all you also help your customers by providing them with quick solutions to their problems by providing them a reliable platform to interact with you. A well moderated, active forum is always a good asset for your website.

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