Profile linking is one of the ways by which you can link back to your site. It involves adding your website URLs to the personal, professional, or business profiles that you create on various websites. You can sign up as a user or member on forums, social media sites, and other kinds of membership sites. Many such sites allow you to include your website URL on your profile, as well as insert links into your signature, comments, or updates.
However, not all of those sites are worth creating profiles on. When choosing sites on which to create your profile, you will need to consider these things:
- Is it an “authority” site? Profile links from authority sites give you quality backlinks. Quality backlinks carry more weight towards helping your web pages rank higher on the SERPs.
- Is it a high PR site? Again, it is all about backlink quality. Sites with high PR pages give you higher quality backlinks than no PR sites, even if the particular web page on which your profile link is sitting is not a high PR page on the site with high PR pages.
- Is the site relevant to your own website? The search engines like it when links to a site come from another site that deals with generally the same topic, where the content on the first website complements the content on the second website, and vice versa. Why? It makes for a better experience when a user finds related information easily, through links to relevant web pages.
- Is it a site with an active community? Creating profiles on membership sites where the users hardly ever come in to participate at all is not really worth it. Community sites with relatively inactive members lose their value over time, in most cases quickly, and so will the value of your profile links there.
- Are the profile links dofollow? Many sites, while allowing you to create profile links, tag those links as nofollow, and thus spiders do not crawl the pages to which you linked on your profile. Nofollow links are not counted as backlinks. At the same time, though, nofollow links can still be of value if they are on sites where users from your target market actively participate. If those users perceive your links as leading to something worth looking at, they will click on those links and give you direct, and targeted, traffic.
Once you have found good sites for your profile links, be sure to make them count. Be certain you participate regularly in the community through comments, updates, and whatever other ways are available on each particular site to show everyone, including the search engines, that the profile isn’t a “dead” one. Regular participation will also give you more opportunities to create backlinks to your site.
It can indeed be hard to find good sites to create your profile links on. There are those who purchase lists of such sites, others prefer to look for sites on their own, and still others outsource their profile linking. Whichever way one goes, it is still a resource-consuming process that requires patience. But then, like we have always said, search engine optimization IS a game of patience, and while it will take time to do all the SEO work, the benefits to be derived from it are long-lasting and are certain to be gratifying.