If you log on to any Internet forum, you will see that most of the regular contributors have a Signature. This is a small block of text that appears below every post they make. Occasionally, the signature consists of a simple message, or humourous quotation. But in many cases, the signature contains a hyperlink to the poster's web-site. Make a post on a forum and you can see how many people view that post. Now make 50 posts or 100 posts and add up the number of views. The more you post, the greater the chances are that somebody will click your link and visit your site. It's free advertising at its best. Now you can use a very clever piece of psychology; If you make a post in a forum subject that is relevant to what you are selling on your website, you can make a subtle reference to it. For example: Somebody makes a post asking how to stop his widgets from rusting. You reply with some helpful advice and then add "The widgets that I sell have stainless steel gangle-pins, so they don't rust". Anyone reading this may be interested in purchasing your widgets that don't suffer from rust. They will want to know where to go to buy them. The obvious place is the link in your signature, which might read "Click here for rust-proof widgets". Bingo! Traffic to your site. Another huge benefit of links in signature files is the fact that it is a one-way link into your website. The search engines, such as Google, scan the popular forums at least daily, and will soon pick up the link to your site. If the forum has a high page rank, it will have an influence on your site's rank in the search engine results. If the relevancy is high (both the forum and your site refer to widgets), this will improve your rank even more. Now repeat this on all relevant forums and you may end up with some high positions in the search engine pages. Setting up a Signature. There are several different forum programs, but most of them work in a very similar way. First locate your member account settings from the forum menu. You will find a place to enter a signature. In here you can write anything as long as it doesn't break the forum rules, but you'll probably want to add your hyperlinks. To do this, you usually need to use what's called BBC (Bulletin Board Codes) instead of HTML. These look very similar, but there are some subtle differences. BBC uses square brackets [ ] instead of angle brackets < > in its tags. So bold text will be enclosed by [b] and [/b]. Hyperlinks use the [url] tag. In its basic form, this will look like this: [url]http://www.yourdomain.com[/url]. However, a URL isn't a very good sales message, so it's better to use the alternative version: [url=http://www.yourdomain.com]Click here for rust-proof widgets[/url]. Now, the message "Click here for rust-proof widgets" will be displayed, but it will link to the site specified. This presents a better sales message to your readers while still providing a link for the search engines to find. Note that BBC doesn't have as many tags as HTML, so formatting is more limited. To find out more about BBC, enter "bulletin board code" into your favourite search engine.