Hello! I would like to ask that what are the benefits of posting in forums with the link to your site is in your siggy. Does it increase pagerank or increase the sites that link back to you?

Ya all these posts will count as a backlink to your website and eventually will help u in raising your ' PR ' if u have them in your signature or sometimes if u post a direct link but some forums dont allow direct links being considered as spam same is the case over here so the best thing would be to put some links in the sigh. =)

thanks for the reply. Another question I have in mind is posting in directories a great way to also increase pagerank? Even in relatively new directories. And why do some people frown upon the idea of having reciprocal links to the directory?

Yes definitely getting backlinks from the directory will help you boost your ' PR ' but always submit in the right category specially when you're submitting at DMOZ plus some directories that are free will ask you for a reciprocal link just in order to get a back link from you to increase their ' PR ' else reciprocal doesnt means anything else.

Posting in forums might give you some backlinks but most forum thread url's include a lot of veriables and aren't spidered by some search engines.

I would use forums for the information sharing they are intended for and any incidental pr help they give is nice. But hours spent posting in forums just to gain pr is probably not your best use of time.

We spend our seo time writing articles. They seem to have a very big benefit. They add quality content to your site and you can submit them to article sites to be published for backlinks.

Best Regards,
Rodney

I actually get my best backlinks from forum posts. I usually post in webmaster forums, so the posts usually revolve around my site. That, in combination with a relevant backlink to my site usually really helps.

What many people fail to realize is that by posting in other forums related to your site's genre can REALLY make a difference in getting your name out within your industry. Especially if you make lots of really high quality posts, you can earn a reputation as an expert in your field. People then want to go to the website of the person who is such an expert at whatever it is.

I Hearch somewhere that getting rid of linkbacks alone from forums may devaluate your link (Especially for Google). Don't know weather it is true or not,

From my experience posting inside the forums can be useful only if you make a lot of posts because the backlink ratio for this pratice help only a little, anyway i don't feel that pr is the most important think, I had a website banned from google for 1 year without an apparent reason, and this site was the most visited of my network, I received visits from the other search engines and directories and they had more relevance than the actual google searches that i receive now.

Posting in forums is definitely a great tool to use.

As another post noted content is still king and will always help to make your site a desirable place to visit. But if you want people to see your site. Posting a link to it in your signature and building a good reputation is a sure way to generate targeted traffic that can build your site's visability.

Forums are good for generating targeted traffic and strengthen your online presence and it also help to build backlinks but it all depends upon the PR of particular pages where you post, generally the internal pages have very low PR or even few have "0" PR, hence obviously thats not going to be considered as good backlinks.