The Value of Signature Linking

The word signature came from the Latin word signature which means sign, a hand written depiction of some one’s name or other identifying mark that a person writes on a documents as a proof of identity and it acts as a seal. But when it comes to emails and news groups, there exists another type of signature which is dependent on one’s language. For this signature to be automatically appended, users will need to set one or more signs of custom text known as a signature block. This block of text usually includes a name, contact information, and sometimes a quotation or an image. This gives an object or piece of information its identity, so to speak.

Signature linking is a way of livening up your email and forum postings. There are a number of different signature linking techniques to guarantee this. One is attaching text links or images after each of your posts in forums and another is to provide a URL every time you comment on a blog post or news article.

Most good blogs or sites allow you to have a signature on your written post to message boards, bulletin boards or forums. Your signature appears every time you write or answer a question on the forum. What sets apart signature linking from other links is that they are editable, especially in forums. If you want to have a high search engine ranking, you may consider the option to edit your forum signature given and you can update the URL using the WYSIWYG editor. Email addresses and full URLs are often automatically recognized as links in some forum boards. Recipients are thus provided a convenient means of linking to the sender’s email address or website simply by clicking on the highlighted links. By changing your forum signature to point to your site’s domain, you are giving your site a lot of web publicity.

But be forewarned. Changing an old signature into a new one will not ensure the same performance for your new site. The text surrounding the link is included in Google’s ranking factors. The more relevant the words used around the link, the higher the value given to your forum signature link. And the messages will have to be relevant, too, and must match the same degree of trust and authority as you wanted to pass on to your website.

Through signature linking, the foundation for today and tomorrow’s secure electronic transaction with stronger and reliable signatures is provided. The nice thing about using the signature link is that an email scrubber will not see the signature as a traditional link associated with and contained in junk mail. The result more or less is that you can slip your URL under the radar. This is one of the hardest yet effective link building strategy as information sources that generate site visitors.

- by Marie Cor