By Matt Hayden
Building backlinks to your site is extremely important for SEO. Two of the easiest ways to do this are by participating in forums that allow dofollow signatures, and by posting thoughtful comments on dofollow blogs in your niche. While both of these methods are effective and free, I believe that forum marketing has advantages over blog commenting.
Firstly, a blog is usually written by one person. So the posts accumulate very slowly. You might wait a couple of weeks after commenting, then return to a blog and still see nothing new that you can genuinely respond to. When you log into an active forum with lots of members, however, there will always be something new and interesting to post about. Before you know it you will have answered three or four questions, thereby gaining several more backlinks.
Secondly, if a forum has a policy of allowing dofollow links in signatures, then it will probably stay that way for as long as the forum lives. If it's a popular forum, that should be a very long time indeed.
Blogs are different in this regard. It takes a lot of time and effort to keep a blog going. Because of this, most bloggers stop posting eventually. And if they are paying for hosting (which is often the case, especially with Wordpress blogs) their blogs tend to disappear completely.
Also, dofollow blogs usually get swamped with comment spam. So even if they keep going, their owners often turn them back to nofollow after a while. So your comment links lose their search engine "juice". And any subsequent comments you make won't have any to start with.
The final advantage is that when you post to forums, you can log into your account and see everything that you've written all in one place. It's easy to cut and paste these thoughts to a file on your hard drive. You can use this as raw material for content that you can post on your own blog, website or in article directories. As long as you rewrite it substantially, Google will see it as unique content and it will help greatly to lift your rankings.
Blog commenting doesn't lend itself to such a strategy. It's very hard to keep track of all your blog comments, after all. Unless you remember to cut and paste every comment you write when you actually do it, chances are you'll lose track of them. So blog comments are a very much a "one off" strategy as opposed to a renewable resource.
Matt Hayden is a Sydney-based online marketer. He writes an often humorous blog about current affairs and popular culture.
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