Adding a forum to your website can provide you with many benefits. It can help you with SEO, can help you talk to and support your customers, build your brand and reputation, and target new customers.
Adding A Forum To Your Website – SEO Benefits
Search engines read every page of your website. A busy forum will create keyword rich pages throughout your website. This can help you bring new traffic in and improve PageRank of your website in general.
Interacting With Your Customers And Prospects
A forum is a fairly informal place but you can share announcements, talk about features and benefits of doing business with you, and you can answer questions.
You can create a knowledgebase about your product and or service, use the forum to manage support tickets in order to effectively run your customer service department, and you can use it to give your clients a chance to talk to someone from your organization as well as one another.
While all the chatter is happening, you’re providing information to prospects as well. People interested in possibly buying from you may browse your forum, see the community, see your ability to service and communicate with your customers, and this may entice visitors to become buyers.
Adding a forum to your website is generally quite simple to set up and most web hosting providers offer easy installation with a few clicks from your control panel. After you set it up, you just need to build a community and manage it on an ongoing basis.
Don’t Forget Forum Moderation
Forum moderation is important, so your forum doesn’t end up a place that could hurt your online reputation or your website’s rankings due to spam. You may even opt to have someone manage it for you once it grows past the point of your being able to dedicate enough time to it.
Have a most outstanding day.
Sean RasmussenAussie Internet Marketing
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008 - 2012
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Skip the forum and just use Google Buzz. We are finding that Google Buzz users are very happy with it’s forum like, threaded, long copy features and participate highly.
Rather than go thru the trouble of installing a forum on your own site, Google Buzz will allow you to get all the same benefits instantly with far less effort or admin hassles.
Sounds like something that may be worthwhile looking into Chris. My main concern is that you are never really sure how long a product like Buzz (or any third party services) will be around for, if they happen to take it off the shelf, your forum is gone. Lets just hope Google Buzz doesn’t disappear like some of their other products have done in the past
Sounds great but I guess you may need enough attention to form a forum and so not for beginners? Forums held by your web hosting services should charge you some monthly fee too, right? As a newbie, I may look into Google Buzz first just to practise. Sorry Sean, but I agree your forum strategy is more for a long term effect too.
No need to be sorry Tess, it’s not my strategy but a simple article covering the benefits of adding a forum to your website. You would have to weigh up whether or not a forum is right for you and your website prior to making the decision to add one