Forum and blog commenting are extremely powerful tools for driving free, targeted traffic to your site, in addition to improving your site’s ranking with numerous quality backlinks. Forums are specially designed websites that allow people with similar interests to chat by sharing messages.

Blogs, on the other hand, are typically operated by a single person, who posts messages relating to a specific topic. In most cases, readers have the opportunity to share their opinions on specific posts through comment sections.

Before you make any posts to forums or comments to blogs, make sure the links are ‘do follow’ links. This means that the site does not use the no follow tag. You may check for no follow links by reviewing the HTML code or by using a special browser plug-in. Firefox has a couple you can choose from.

First, let’s look at forums and how to use them effectively to help them generate traffic to your site. To start, you’ll need to find a forum in your specific niche – it doesn’t make sense to start a comment campaign on a silk worm enthusiast forum when you’re promoting a “make money online” product. Search Google or any of the other major search engines for “make money online +forum” and you should be able to identify several forums in your area of interest.

Once you’ve identified a few candidates, check them out to determine which forums are the most active. With this method, you might as well drive traffic as you increase your backlinks. If a forum only has a few members that post once a month on average, you won’t be able to drive as much traffic as a heavily trafficked forum with hundreds or thousands of active members. You should be able to find membership statistics posted somewhere on the forum’s homepage, or you can look at the threads to see how many comments are made on average and how recently they’ve been updated.

Once you’re ready to starting posting to a forum community, you’ll likely need to register for an account, which should be as simple as entering a user name, password and valid email address. Once your account is set up, you can enter additional information in your user profile and create a special “signature file” that’s displayed after every post you make in the forum. The signature file is the place where you’ll want to include a description of your site and a link to the page. This way, whenever you post to a forum, people will see this advertisement to your site and be encouraged to click through.

A few words of caution about posting to forums, however. First, most forums have strict rules about advertising, and may close your account if they think you’re spamming the forum with messages about your site. Therefore, when you post to a forum, be sure you’re providing helpful information, either in your own posts or in response to others. Not only will this convince the forum owners that you’re a valuable member of the community, you’ll be building up your reputation as an expert in the niche, which will make other members more likely to click through to your site.

Blogs focus on one person’s postings, instead of community conversations. However, active blogs may have just as many visitors as popular forums, so they’re still an important part of your traffic generation campaign. To find blogs in your niche, run a similar Google search for “making money online +blog” and check out several of the top results. Look for sites that are frequently updated with new posts and that have several user comments following each blog post.

Typically, there are fewer restrictions about posting links in your blog comments than there are on forum posts, but that doesn’t mean you should spam the blog, by posting only your site’s link in the comment sections. Most blog owners retain the right to delete user comments, and your posts will quickly be removed if the owner considers them to be spam. Instead, focus again on providing valuable content that makes users want to click through to your site. With continued effort, you should see a tremendous return in terms of traffic and improved site ranking on the major search engines.

In order to find the best do follow blogs on your topic, use InlineSEO’s online DoFollow Diver tool. This free, online tool will allow you to search over 700 blogs that do not use the no follow tag. This means the search engine spiders will see the link from their blog to yours. Type in the keywords related to your site and find the best blogs to post comments to. Remember not to spam, make sure to add useful content in your comments. You may find this valuable tool by visiting www.inlineseo.com and clicking on the SEO Tools link. You’ll see Do Follow Diver listed there.

Additional Articles in the SEO Tutorial Series:
SEO Module 1 - SEO Introduction & Keyword Research (Watch Online Video)
-Part 1: What is SEO?
-Part 2: Keyword Research
-Part 3: What is LSI?
-Part 4: What are Long-Tail Keywords?

SEO Module 2 - On-Site Optimization (Watch Online Video)
-Part 5: On-Site vs Off-Site
-Part 6: On-Site Optimization Details
-Part 7: What are Meta Tags?
-Part 8: What is Anchor Text?

SEO Module 3 - Off-Site Optimization (Watch Online Video)
-Part 9: Off-Site Optimization
-Part 10: Directory Submissions
-Part 11: Article Submissions
-Part 12: Press Release Submissions
-Part 13: Forum & Blog Commenting
-Part 14: Social Bookmarking
-SEO Tutorial Conclusion