Off Page Search Engine Optimisation
Linking
Off-page optimisation is pretty much all about links. The more links to your website the better the search engines like it. But! and it is a big but. They must be links from other sites on the same or similar topic. If the links are not from a site with content on a related topic the links are useless. In fact they could even harm your ranking. This is because the search engines might think that you were dealing with or part of a link farm.
The other option open to most people is the link exchange or reciprocal link. This is really just a link swap. I link to you if you link to me. This system can be beneficial if the links come from content pages. The link exchange system usually involves the use of link pages and although not totally valuless they are not worth as much as they once were. The value of exchanged links and link pages varies amongst the search engines but the big five do not attach as much importance to them as on migh hope. However, I believe that a relevant link from a quality relevant website is always good and would reccomment exchanging links.
Anchor Text
It is very important to get the right anchor text in the links to your website. The anchor text in a link is the clickable text in a link. This is noted by the search engines and it contributes to the search engines impression of what the website is about. So, if the search engines fond that the gardening website that you have has hundreds of travel links from the far east and the orient, chances are that it will not rank well for gardening and it will not rank well for travel either because the actual content of the website is not about tavel. They will probably be confused and put your website to one side until they can decide what to do with it.
The anchor text must vary or the search engines may think you are spamming. Try using synonyms of the important keywords you want to rank for and use phrases from time to time instead of just one or two words.
Where To Get Links
Getting good links is not easy. You can ask other webmasters to link to you, but the chances are that they will want a link in return and that devalues the link they are giving you. A one-way link is worth far more. But there are ways. The easiest and most popular these days are these four:
- Article Marketing
- Blog Comments
- Forum Comments
- Social Bookmarking
Article Marketing
Article Marketing may be one of the best ways of getting relevant links to your website. It woks like this. You write an article of about five to nine hundred words and submit it to a couple of dozen article directories. With each article there is a little information about the author. It is sometimes known as the bio box or authro's box. You are usually allowed to put two or three live links in here. The links are then distributed with the article. Article directories allow anyone who visits them to publish your article on their own website as long as they also publish the bio box with yor links intact. The site that is posting your article is likely to be of the same topic as your article and the article is of the same topic as your website, so it is a good link to have for SEO purposes. If the website is bad it does not matter because links from bad websites do not harm you only linking to a bad site from your own is harmful.
One of the main difficulties with this form of link building is that many people feel that they can not write a good article. Well that is not necessarily the obstacle that they think it is. There are many freelance authors out there now who would knock out an excellant article at a very reasonable price. There are also article distribution services that will take care of that end of it too. But even better is a service that will do both.
Best of all is doing it yourself. Read this free article-writing ebook. You might surprise yourself.
Blog Comments and Forum Comments
Blog Comments and Forum Comments are basically the same so I will take them together.