linking in?

this never made any sense to me. how does a site link into my site? meaning, they just put a link to my site on their site or something? lol.

I think I'm going to have a few of my articles posting on a site called bodybuilding.com that is a huge huge huge site with tons of visitors. I told the owner instead of paying me for them to just put a link to my site at the bottom of the article. For one, that will get a lot of people visiting my site. For two, according to what I've read this will help my search engine ranking unless I misunderstand.

That's right. Any link that exists on another site will help you.

However, try to only get links from sites that are relevant to you own (i.e. same or very similar topic).

The text (called "anchor text") that you include in the anchor is important as well. Rather than just linking:

mywidgets.com

You should prefer:

Widgets

Use a variety of different keyword combinations in your *anchor* text (i.e. "Widgets" in the anchor text in the blue link above.

With bodybuilding.com, I would think they would normally provide you a link in your article for free.

When the article is posted, view the source of the page. Search to find your link. Within the a href code that contains your link, look for the attribute rel=nofollow.

Note: If rel=nofollow is there, they are instructing the search engines not to follow your link. Therefore, SEO value from those rel=nofollow links is unlikely.

Note: Don't forget the value of clickthrough traffic. bodybuilding.com has a big audience. So even if your link would be rel=nofollowed, you will still end up with some volume of visitors who click the link to visit your site.

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

When the article is posted, view the source of the page. Search to find your link. Within the a href code that contains your link, look for the attribute rel=nofollow.

Note: If rel=nofollow is there, they are instructing the search engines not to follow your link. Therefore, SEO value from those rel=nofollow links is unlikely.

Note: Don't forget the value of clickthrough traffic. bodybuilding.com has a big audience. So even if your link would be rel=nofollowed, you will still end up with some volume of visitors who click the link to visit your site.

I'm sorry. I have no clue what any of this means, lol. Source of the page? href code? How would I view this?

But thanks. I'm not going to ask for anything though anyways since this is like free advertising to me. I was going to purchase a $150 on another site but ended up having some problems with them so I'll probably purchase your software later on today instead.

The only real concern I have is my target audience. You see, lately I've been attracting a lot of people who personally I think are looking for something a little different than what I offer (even though they are still welcome). I own a weightlifting forum, bolttraining.com, and we are mainly about getting people who are serious about bodybuilding, strength training whatever, on track with their workout programming, diet, etc. Now there is an entirely different croud that is the recreational lifters croud, those that just exercise to stay in shape -- you know, the majority of people lifting anyways. It's not that I dont want them there, I just want the majority to be of the croud I first mentioned or else I will just continue to attract these kinds of people. Is there anything SEO-wise I can do about this?

The problem with getting people that highly targetted is very difficult. The problem is that both crowds will tend to search for similar keywords.

Example:

You might have an article on biceps training emphasizing say "concentration curls". It's actually feasible that a recreational lifter is more likely to search for that term, since bodybuilders/weight lifters will know all about that topic already.

Therefore, when you create new content/discussions choose topics and titles that are related to stuff only likely to draw advanced weightlifters/bb-ers/fitness people.

I think your content in itself will do the trick. If you create an article on say the "Bowflex", then you're asking to get the recreational crowd to show up.

The other thing to consider is that while you may get those visitors, make sure you have content that is going to appear to your target group. Recreational lifters are probably not going to return everyday to read articles about Branch Warren doing dips with 300 lbs. of chains. You get the idea.

Do some keyword research. Title your threads and articles to cover keywords more likely to be searched by your target audience.

Thanks! Do you know of any place to do keyword research other than just typing the keywords in and seeing what results are.

But anyways, yeah, if I started writing about biceps and bowflexes and concentration curls then I would definitely get the recreation crowd. And this particular issue is even harder to deal with because I'm competing with Joe Shmoe who promises 30lb of muscle in 10 weeks if you buy his CD.

The other problem is the recreation lifters I have on my site discuss whatever topics are hot with them like aerobics, eating healthy, whatever. And I'm afraid the search engines might start scouting mostly those threads.

I wish I could just make a list of threads for them to scout like a sitemap maybe. OR, I could put all the recreation threads on the robots.txt file

You could move all the recreational threads into another forum, and then block that forum with your robots.txt.

You don't think it would be good to keep the recreational lifters on your site? Are you running AdSense or another ad network that could benefit from the traffic?

There are a bunch of keyword research tools out there. You might check this one out from Aaron Wall, author of the SEO book:
SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

You could move all the recreational threads into another forum, and then block that forum with your robots.txt.

You don't think it would be good to keep the recreational lifters on your site? Are you running AdSense or another ad network that could benefit from the traffic?

There are a bunch of keyword research tools out there. You might check this one out from Aaron Wall, author of the SEO book:
SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool

No I dont run adsense or anything like that. All the recreational threads are in their own forum. Can I just block the forum and that would include all the threads within it?

If you have vBSEO installed, you will be able to block the recreational forum with robots.txt.