Forums and online communities are excellent additions to
websites that make them interesting and informative. Forums
provide a means for your website's visitors to interact with
one another to discuss about anything they wish, or about
products and services you are offering. With human activity
on your forums, visitors are more inclined to stay and interact
with other members. What your forum members post may be added
content to your website as they bring with them unique knowledge
and experiences which are added to your website, thus expanding
your offerings. Other visitors who are reading these forums
may find information useful and stay to learn more or join
the forum in order to ask the other members of the forum.
The most successful forums turn a website ‘sticky’.
A sticky website is one in which surfers are interested in
visiting over and over again. One reason for the stickiness
of a website is the content available, and forums have information
that is updated frequently if members are very active. Visitors
transform from one-time browsers to residents and regulars
of the website just to check out what is new and what others
have to say. A “sticky” website also attracts
more visitors as members of your forum grow with the community
and spread your website’s URL to friends and contacts.
This word-of-mouth marketing is priceless and can very often
generate a lot of traffic to your website with almost zero
costs. These new visitors who become members then continue
to spread the word about your forum community and very soon
you would have a thriving community that supports and feeds
your website with new traffic.
In addition to turning a website sticky so that visitors
come back often to find new information and content, forums
offer additional content that may improve your search engine
ranking. As every webmaster knows, a tremendous amount of
traffic can come from a first position ranking in the search
engines such as Google, Yahoo or MSN. These 3 search engines
account for almost 100% of the web-searches done by people
on the net. Being ranked number one for the search term that
your site is optimized for, such as the keyword “sports
shoes” will almost ensure that everyone who searches
for that keyword would click on the first returned result
from the search engine and land on your website. If your
website sells sports shoes, you can almost guarantee that
that tremendous amount of traffic can be turned to huge sales
and revenues. So by adding a forum where members can discuss
sports shoes on your website, you are generating content
related to “sports shoes”. These content pages
are then indexed by search engines and increase the number
of pages that your site has on the search engine. With such
relevant content, other sites linking to your content and
the content itself will aid in your climbing of the search
engine rankings.
Dax Christopher maintains a two year old webmaster community
at http://www.Buildtolearn.com,
a forum community that discusses web-hosting and webmaster
related issues such as web-design, page coding, SEO and many
others. Visit BuildtoLearn.com to learn more about developing
and growing large communities.
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