SEO Tutorial Part 9 – Off-Site Optimization Details
We’ve discussed on-site search engine optimization in great depth – including some of the different adjustments you can make to your webpages to make them more appealing to search engines – but these techniques are only half the battle. Off-site techniques are just as important in getting your site ranked well in the search engines results. For the most part, off-site SEO techniques revolve around the links that point to your site from other webpages. These links back to your site are commonly called backlinks.
The following types of backlinks offer the most benefit in terms of off-site search engine optimization:
Links from sites with a high Google PageRank – Google’s PageRank system is a website quality indicator that takes into account how popular a site is by reviewing the amount and quality of the sites that link to it. Sites with a high PageRank are considered to be more reputable than those with low ranks, so backlinks to your site that come from high PageRank sites naturally offer more of an advantage in terms of search engine optimizatiton.
Links from sites with similar content – Search engines consider the source of an inbound link when determining how much weight to give it. For example, if an authority site on working from home links back to your site on making money online, the search engines perceive this as an endorsement of the quality of your content. Consequently, the search engines will give this link more weight than they would to one from a free link exchange directory.
Link extensions matter – Search engines tend to give more weight to backlinks that come from well established sites with .com, .edu and .gov extensions. Specifically, search engines tend to assume that the information on .gov and .edu sites is more reputable than that on less well-known .info or .us extensions. These links can be extremely difficult to get, but if you are able to get linked from one of these sites, you should see your rankings increase dramatically.
The number of links to your site – Of course, all things considered, a site with 600 high quality backlinks will be ranked better by the search engines than one with only six high quality inbound links. In the eyes of the search engines, this demonstrates that many different people think highly of your site – making it a better choice to send traffic to in response to user searches.
Link building is hardly a precise art, as there are a number of additional factors that the search engines take into account when measuring the strength of the backlinks to your site. In addition, search engine algorithms change frequently, so the factors they give weight to now could change without warning. However, it is safe to say that building up good backlinks from other quality sites is a sound strategy when it comes to search engine optimization, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
So how can you start getting links? Well there are several different methods you can choose to jumpstart your link building campaign. These include directory submissions, article submissions, press releases, forum and blog commenting, and social bookmarking.
Additional Articles in the SEO Tutorial Series:
SEO Module 1 – SEO Introduction & Keyword Research (Watch Online Video)
-Part 1: What is SEO?
-Part 2: Keyword Research
-Part 3: What is LSI?
-Part 4: What are Long-Tail Keywords?
SEO Module 2 – On-Site Optimization (Watch Online Video)
-Part 5: On-Site vs Off-Site
-Part 6: On-Site Optimization Details
-Part 7: What are Meta Tags?
-Part 8: What is Anchor Text?
SEO Module 3 – Off-Site Optimization (Watch Online Video)
-Part 9: Off-Site Optimization
-Part 10: Directory Submissions
-Part 11: Article Submissions
-Part 12: Press Release Submissions
-Part 13: Forum & Blog Commenting
-Part 14: Social Bookmarking
-SEO Tutorial Conclusion
I find that link building to be the most important part of SEO. You can even rank for words that you didn’t optimize your site for by posting using the keyword anchor text you are trying to rank for. The most difficult part is actually finding high PR sites that are willing to link to you.
I completely agree with you. I think that off-page optimization is just as important how would you promote certain product or services if people don’t even know that your site exist. Off-page optimization really plays a big part on your link building campaign. I discover recently that video and article marketing is just a great way to drive massive traffic coming to your site. There are a lot of top ranking sites where you can submit these, and these marketing technique really proves to be a successful one.
SEM Specialist
Let me thank you before leaving a comment. A thorough Research, thanks for the information.
As you said offsite optimization and link building are very important for getting search engine love. When I was started working with http://www.newgenresoft.com It’s Rating was as poor as 5478930 lol, But with gradual linkbuilding [It was very hard to find quality do follow links] I took it all the way to get a rank in 5 lacs. See all its worked just with two months and because of links alone.
Now the target is to make it to five digit. Cheers!
Link Building has been an essential factor to rank well in Search Engines.Previously,content was considered to be the king, which is still true upto certain extent, but in addition to that search engines have started giving more preference to the volume and quality of incoming external links.There has been floods of traffic pouring in with the use of Video marketing recently, and since google is now capable of indexing Flash content as well,has offered a new way to attract traffic.
While link building is important, it doesn’t work properly if you haven’t spent the time to do you on page optimization. Many people fail to properly complete the first step, which is to ensure your website has the keywords you want to rank for on the site…