Off-Site SEO

Off-Site SEO refers to the Search Engine Optimization techniques that do not actually occur on the pages of the site being optimized. To beginners this idea that things on other web pages may affect the optimization of a page may seem strange, but Off-Site SEO is the strongest element of Search Engine Optimization there is. But, before you begin off-site SEO, make sure your web site is complete.

The hands-down winner in the SEO contest is link buidling. Proper link building can make the worst on-page optimized site rank like a god among humans (1). So, what do you do and how do you do it?

First, what's your site's keywords? You absolutely must know this before you begin link building, or your SEO work will back-fire. This is because we want to make sure when we get other sites to link to us we absolutely want them to use our keywords in the anchor text of the link to our site. If we pick the wrong keywords, and later change them, we'll have all these links out there with old keywords attached. So get those keywords now.

The cat's out of the bag. The high king of Search Engine Optimization (off-site SEO in particular) is inbound links. The more links we get leading to our site with our keywords in the anchor text (2) the better.

How do we get links? There are a few ways. One way is to create a link page on your site and offer link exchanges. I recommend against this, unless you are only exchanging links (or reciprocal linking) with relevent sites (3). That is, if your site is about movies, exchange links with other sites that are about movies, otherwise, do not exchange.

Another way is to contact other sites directly and ask that they link to you. This tends not to be very successful, depending on the topic of these sites you may get a 10% reply. If you do choose this route, make sure your emails are always polite, and do not mass-email. Each email you send should go to only one email address, and each email should be unique -- it should identify the site you are looking to get your link on, complement the site, and offer a logical reason why a link to your site would be appropriate.

Another avenue of link building and off-site SEO is getting the site listed in directories. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of link directories on the internet (4). These directories have categories that you can select to add your link to, and are most often human-edited (5). Some of these directories require a link back to them, or a small fee for a link, but many are free. When you are ready to submit your site to a directory make sure you read the directory's guidelines first. The editors of these sites typically get thousands of requests, do not waste their time (or yours) by not following their rules. Make sure you find the most appropriate category to submit your site to.

An option for link building that should not go unnoticed is article writing. There are services that offer webmasters free articles for their web sites. The authors of these articles are allowed to place a small bio of themselves at the end, and within this biography can place links to their sites. So a good idea is to write some articles on the topic of your web site, and place a link to your site in the bio section (using appropriate anchor text, of course). Then submit these articles to the distributing sites (do a search, you'll find them!).

The last technique we'll discuss is purchasing links. You need to be very careful when doing this. Not only can it sometimes just be a waste of money, but it can in fact be detrimental (I know this from first hand experience). Try not to purchase a link that appears unter something like "Advertisements" or "Sponsors". Also, sometimes when you buy a link (especially on some of today's blogs) you get a site-wide link. With major, and old, blogs, this may mean your site gets a sudden boost of thousands of links (one for every page of the blog). This is obviously not natural link building, and your site could be de-listed.

To get an idea of how powerful link building is to SEO, realize that if your site sold cars, and you got thousands of links to it where the anchor text was "Venetian blinds" your site would rank very well in the search engines for the term "venetian blinds" (even though it may not be anywhere on the site) and may not rank at all for cars.

Now that you have probably begun your on-page and off-site SEO work, you want to get to the top of the search engines. To take your search engine optimizing to the next level read Getting to the top of Search Engines.