Enter Online Communities

Online community has been a very trendy word to use lately. It is used often to define different social groups using Internet to communicate and interact with each other.  The best examples in term of social sites are the well known Facebook, Digg or simply MSN Messenger. Social media sites have become extremely popular and their growth has been incredibly fast and sudden. It really seems that people love to share details of their personal life, show pictures and be able to chat with friends that are all over the world. Blogs, forums and wikis also are considered to be part of those social sites that help their users build up an online community. All of them are interesting and useful for a company that wants to build its traffic and get its customers informed of what is going on and be able to discuss with them. We have seen in recent years, more and more companies creating a facebook profile and encourage their customers to become fans. Blogs, forums and wikis on top of helping directly to improve traffic and bring new and different content to a site, also help with inbound links. It is obviously important to be careful and not abuse the system as if you use your blog or wiki as a link farm, no one will visit it and the search engines may just ignore it. A good example of a subtle way to get back links to your site is to open up an account on forums and create a signature with a link back to a page of your site. So each time you write something, your signature will appear at the bottom of your post, which means on top of contributing to a forum by giving advice, you will help your site with a few more back links from an industry related place. Posting comments or articles on other blogs can also benefit you in some way. You have to be careful with blogs though as most of them put a “nofollow” tag on the links on comments which means Google will not take them into account but the other search engines will. Online communities, if used properly and with care can provide great results in term of traffic, customer loyalty and help your ranking with a few more links going to your site. Having a blog or a facebook profile means that it needs to be updated often which means that all those things take time but can be very rewarding. A Search engine marketing company or an SEO company would usually know about those things.

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