Being active in social communities is very important for building a brand around your own brain and company. Forums became very popular for SEO several years back because people were able to insert their URL’s into their signature which appears at the bottom of their every post. This however caused spammers and black hat SEO’ers to see an opportunity to gain easy links. Many threads were filled with self promotion with links going back to their websites. Forum owners then got clever and added the nofollow rule which stops search engines from following these links and so spamming stopped virtually overnight, plus obviously these spammers were being booted out of forums for their black hat antics by forum administrators (Administrators still today have a zero tolerance against spammers and self promotion).

However, people still use forums to promote their business/products (in a non-evasive way) by placing links into their signatures even though search engines won’t follow them. They do this because many bloggers hang out in these communities looking for businesses/products to write about, if you become known as an authoritative person within a forum, people will be visiting your site and you will be written about in blogs by your admirers. So indirectly you are creating link bait by giving the community your reputable advice and opinions.

A good way to find topical posts which relate to keywords you want to target is by searching forums. There are several search engines which only search content within forums, so if you are looking to target a certain keyword, for example ‘small business marketing’, you could do a search for ‘small business marketing help’ and find related posts. The keyword in every search you do is ‘help’ because as a service provider you want to offer help and hopefully generate several leads through your wise words. By adding ‘help’ you simply refine your search, which saves you time when searching through the results.

Here are some search engines which I found to be useful:

- Twing

- Board Tracker

- Board Reader

- Omgili

I found Twing to be the most user friendly and having the best results but I suggest trying them all for yourself so you can decide which is the best. I’d be interested to here your comments about these search engines as well.

Twing is the newest of the community discovery tools listed here, it is a decent service with a much more elegant interface than the other sites listed here. The basic funtionality at Twing enables users to search posts, topics and forums and sort by date and relevance. One of the more interesting features at Twing is that users can see who posted the item, when it was posted, and this is the most important part – how many replies and views the post has had. Other noteworthy features include Twing’s Community Buzz page which displays items that are most linked to from forums, hot topics (including those most clicked) and the top communities (fastest growing and most active). There is also a handy little directory to help you identify forums you might be interested in.