Quora is an online community of people providing answers to questions.

How Does Quora Work?

People from around the world visit Quora to ask questions from a community of people who answer them.

Google is in the business of showing web pages that answer questions.

That Quora answers questions may be one of the reasons why Google ranks Quora so highly. They’re a natural and symbiotic fit.

Quora is ranked #345 in traffic out of all sites in the U.S. by web metrics company Alexa.

It is ranked #357 most popular site worldwide.

This five-year Google Trends data shows that Quora has an upward trending profile. That means that Quora is increasing in popularity.

That upward trend is not limited to the United States.

It’s also reflected in France, Germany, Canada, UK, and Australia.

Quora is a popular website that continues to build in popularity.

Is It OK to Link to Your Site on Quora?

Yes, it’s OK to link to your site, as long as it’s done in a manner that enhances the answers that you give.

Linking to one’s own site should be in the context of a citation and help support the answer to a question.

Low-quality, “visit my site” type answers or posts that don’t answer a question might likely be seen as spam.

Focusing on providing a useful answer is the best approach.

How Quora Fits Into a Marketing Strategy

How Can Marketers Use Quora for SEO?

Because of the transactional nature of search marketing consultants, where a client pays for ranking-related benefits and an agency delivers a spreadsheet full of them, some marketers tend to view Quora as a one-and-done type of deal.

Even though the links may be followed, there is a belief that Google might choose to use them for ranking purposes.

There is also a belief that they might increase the “authority” of a site.

First, there’s no real “authority” metric at Google other than links.

But there are indirect ways to build the authority that causes users to become acquainted with a site and begin seeking it out by name.

And that can lead to better rankings, direct visits, word of mouth popularity, and links.

Get the Word Out

The most fundamental element of marketing a business online is to get the word out about it.

The most powerful recommendation a business can get is from one friend recommending a site to another friend.

When a company can get people so enthusiastic about their business that a friend tells another friend, “Go to this business, they’ll take care of you,” that’s practically a license to make money.

Competitors simply cannot compete against that.

But to get to that point, a business needs to get the word out.

Many of the biggest success stories owe their popularity to friend-to-friend recommendations.

That’s an aspect of online marketing that gets lost when the focus is exclusively on ranking for Google.

Google tends to rank web pages that users expect to see.

So if a business is suddenly successful and consumers are sending signals that a site is popular for a certain product or service, Google will want to show that site.

The reason is that Google has always been about showing users the most authoritative site for any particular search query.

But you can’t become popular if nobody’s heard of you.

Quora can be the first step in building that kind of word-of-mouth popularity.