Introduction
Off-Page SEO is the other big part of SEO and relates to activities that you perform on other sites to promote your own. It mostly consists in acquiring links from other sites pointing to your website. Those link are called backlinks.
And although both parts of SEO are a must for a successful website promotion campaign, Off-page SEO is so important these days that, when done properly, can help your website to rank high for keywords that aren’t even on it.
Below I will summarise the main steps that you should include and deploy in your off-SEO strategy:
Main Steps
1. Give highest preference to acquiring inbound links from high-quality websites. Here high-quality means high-RR, several years old, frequently updated sites that rank high for their targeted keywords.
2. Among high-quality sites, give even more preference to links from topically-relatedwebsites, that are in the same niche as yours. Remember that links from topical resources with low PR can be of much greater value than links from High-PR sites that are absolutely irrelevant to your niche.
3. Try to acquire not just any links pointing to your domain, but links that contain your targeted keywords in the anchor text.
Use different variations (synonyms) of the anchor text if you are planning to have a large number of backlinks to that page.
4. Links with an anchor should point to the landing page, which is most relevant for the targeted key phrase (not just to the home page or any page barely related to that term)
5. Approximately 15-20% of all inbound links should point to internal pages of your site. For the best effect, each internal landing page should have only one or two targeted keywords or phrases.
6. Build your links gradually and steadily. There are no hard and fast rules for how quickly you can build inbound links to avoid various Search Engine penalties (e.g. Google sandbox or overoptimisation filter). Remember the key point here is that it should look natural! For instance, even if you started acquiring as many as 100 links a day, keep up with this speedduring the whole of your link building campaign.
7. Be especially careful when promoting a new website (less than 3-4 months old), to avoid the aforementioned filters and penalties. Perhaps, your heard that for a new site you should not acquire more than 5-10 links a day or even a month. This is all relative and, as I said, there is no clear rules for this. Just remember to keep up with whatever speed your chose at the beginning.
I personally would not recommend getting more than 300 links a months at least for the first 3-4 months, unless your site enjoys high traffic that could justify bigger numbers.
8. Try to get mostly one-way links to your website, as those are much more valuable than reciprocal links.
Things to Bear in Mind
9. Provided your site has original content and is regularly and frequently updated, the older it becomes, the easier it gets to rank higher. However, age of the site is not the same as the age of the domain, but is rather counted from the moment when you first filled the site up with content that was indexed by the search engines.
10. The same applies to the link age - the older the age of inbound links the higher your chances to rank high for the targeted keywords. Of course, link building is not a one-off job and unless your site enjoys a great number of natural backlinks due to the quality of its content, you should carry on your link building activity as long as traffic from SE’s is important to your business.
11. The more indexable text content you have and the more frequently it is updated, the higher your chances for good ranking.
Things to Avoid
12. Do not engage in organized link exchange, nor create link farms on your site. Even though this may initially help you to rank higher, eventually SE’s will discover this illegitimate behaviour and will penalise you for that. Thus, in the long run this will hurt your website ranking, rather than help it.
13. Do not build up your inbound links too quickly (see items 6 and 7 above). Instead, if you want to avoid SE’s filters and/or penalties, build links regularly and steadily.
Ways to Acquire Backlinks:
- Create and publish content that makes readers link to your site naturally (known as “link bait”)
- Submit your site to Web Directories (both Free and Paid)
- Write and submit articles to (most popular) Articles Repositories
- Write Press Releases about your website and publish them via PRWeb and other PR services
- Submit your site to Social bookmarks (e.g., del.icio.us) and promote it on social networks (Digg.com, Twitters)
- Create mini-sites on Squidoo and Hubpages and make them point to your site
- Join and participate in discussions on popular topical forums, including link(s) to your site in your signature
- Leave comments on topically-related blogs
- Get yourself a blog and trackback to popular blogs in your niche
- Syndicate your content via RSS feeds
- Request 1-way links from topically-related websites (free or paid)
Concluding Remarks
Remeber - No craftsman is a craftman without his tools!
If you are serious about doing SEO either for yourself or as bespoke service, there is no way you can succeed in competing with other SEO’s and webmasters, unless you get yourself a decent SEO software to promote your websites. Such a software is a must tool for any serious SEO and allows one to automate most of routine and hugely time consuming (but absolutely necessary!) daily SEO tasks.
There are number of SEO software packages out there, but I use and give absolute preference to these two:
- AllSubmitter - Directory Submission Software + SEO Software
- SEO administrator - Comprehensive set of must-have SEO tools
Those are axcellent and the most comprehensive SEO packages that I know, and include a large number of extremely handy SEO tools that can automate and tremendously speed up most of your daily SEO tasks and make you much more successful at SEO and website promotion.
Get them, use them, enjoy the results!
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