ArticleCoop | 7 Steps to Off Page SEO Techniques

7 Steps to Off Page SEO Techniques

By: Bill Wynne

Off page SEO Techniques are very important for any website, blog or otherwise that wants to harness the power of organic traffic from the big search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process that includes a number of elements to insure a more favorable position for your website in search engine result pages like those of Google, Yahoo and Bing. The success of your online marketing is greatly enhanced when you can increase the ratio of your organic traffic to 80%. This traffic is free and very valuable.

There are two kinds of SEO, on page and off page SEO techniques. We will only discus off page SEO techniques in this article. Off page SEO are the things you need to do to get a higher page rank (PR) and a good position in the search engines like Google for your website after you launch the website.

What are the off page SEO techniques? Off page SEO techniques are always connected to building your link popularity. Link popularity represents the number of back links or links back to your website from other websites that your website has. To check you website’s current link popularity, go to Link Popularity and use the free tool to check your website’s link popularity. The greater link popularity that your website possesses the higher your page rank (PR) will be. To build your link popularity you need to increase the number of websites that link back to your website.

There are a number of off page SEO techniques

1. Email site webmasters that are responsible for websites similar to yours in content and ask them for a link that you will reciprocate on. There are sites that have a page full of links and the links are not relevant to each other as far as content is concerned. Link Farms can damage the reputation of your website with Google instead of helping it. It is not advisable that you take the easy route and join in any link farms. Link schemes are not approved by Google and before you take what may appear to be an easy route for getting back links you should read information on Google’s site about illegitimate linking methods, this will assure you of more success with Google. One strategy used is to launch a lot of fraudulent sites to create lots of links to one site or more. Google has ways to track this and the sites involved could likely be blacklisted by Google.

2. Content – The best way to conduct your off page SEO techniques then is to insure that you have unique, highly informative content. When you have great content other webmasters will want to link to your site. If they just copy and paste your content on their website that is a violation of intellectual property copyright laws. Make people want to link to your website. This is the best of all off page SEO techniques to increase the number of websites linking to yours.

3. Article marketing – There are hundreds if not thousands of article directories on the Internet. You can submit articles to these sites and for every submission, you will be allotted a resource box in which you can introduce yourself and share a link to your website. Some of these article directories have high page ranks. If your articles are accepted, they will be included in their pages. Having a website with high PR linking to yours would go a long way in increasing your own page rank. Additionally, if you will submit just one article to a thousand directories, you’d have a thousand pages linking to your website! Sounds like a daunting task? There are services detailed on my blog that you can use for monthly fees or software that is automated.

4. Forum marketing – There are online communities that are dedicated to the subject of your website. Find those forums, join them and become part of the community. You want to leave relevant valuable comments showing you are part of the community and not just spamming. You will be seen as a spammer just there to post a link and you could be banned from that forum. In the forum you will be able to have a signature box that will accompany every post or comment that you make in the forum. Your resource box allows you to have one or two links to your website. For every post you make, you will have a link to your website.

5. Craigslist – Craigslist is a well-known classifieds website with a PR7. A PR7 score is very high! Having a link on a website with a PR7 will give a boost to your website. To have a link on Craigslist go to the site, choose the category that is relevant to your website, post your advertisement with your link of course and see what happens. It doesn’t matter if anyone reads your ad. The object was to have a link to your website on Craigslist. Your ad will expire so you should have a way to remind yourself to post there when your ad expires to maintain a constant link there.

6. Look for partners who are willing to include your list in their pages. The easiest way to do this is to use the free tool at Webconfs

7. Triangular linking – Google does not like reciprocal linking but triangular linking is one way of getting around this limitation. Look for webmasters who will work with you on this one of the off page SEO techniques. Webmaster A posts a link to Webmaster B’s website. Webmaster B posts a link to Webmaster C’s website. Webmaster C posts a link to Webmaster A’s website. It is the same principle as reciprocal linking, but the search engine spiders are not programmed to determine this type of linking.

Author Resource: Find more related information on Article Marketing on Bill’s Blog. Since 99′ Bill Wynne has successfully used the Internet to effectively convey information for profit and not-for-profit. Recently, Bill created a blog to share his experiences in Internet Marketing. His blog offers free tools and articles like Off Page SEO Techniques

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Now we will move on to getting started.

Step One:  Analyse your current site.

Why? Because firstly it will give you a list of things you need to do to improve your SEO and secondly it will enable you to track your improvement overtime.

There are a number of great sites which help you do this, but we love Web SEO Analytics tools.

WebSEOAnalytics has excellent SEO analysis tools, best of all they are free.  The first one to use is the Web SEO Analysis Tool, it will give you a comprehensive report on your current site.

Step Two:  Get the SEO Tool Bar

Download the SEO tool bar for Firefox, it you have IE or another browser, you may wish to consider installing Firefox.

This tool bar gives you excellent analysis tools for every site you visit.  The information it has is really useful as you go forward in undertaking the SEO yourself.

You could also consider using the Alexa toolbar as well, it has some useful tools in it as well.  Alexa can help your search rankings as explained in a previous article

Step Three: Start Fixing the Issues

The Analysis Report you received from Web SEO Analytics may include some issues or errors you may not understand.  Don’t stress, either go back to Web SEO Analytics web site or get this really good free ebook that can help.

SEO or search engine optimization is a term most people are familiar with.  However for those that are still struggling with the term, an analogy is helpful.

Last century the one of the critical business marketing tools was to have your company listed in the Yellow Pages.

Now from a sales and marketing perspective, the key to Yellow Pages success was to have your Company Name either:

1. Listed First or
2. Have a big Advertisement

First Listing Importance

If you still use or can remember using Yellow Pages then you would remember seeing companies with names like Aardvark or AAAAcleaning etc.

Why, because the Yellow Pages listed in alphabetical order.   So if you were in an industry with lots of competitors then being listed in the first few results was really important.  The reason is simple consumers tended to start at the top of a list to find the name and number of a company to contact.

This same tendency still applies with consumers.  However now consumers use the Internet search engines, primarily Google, Yahoo and Bing to find the same information.

And like their Yellow Pages habit, consumers still more likely to select from the first few listings than to keep flicking through the pages of results.

This is what SEO is all about

SEO is about getting your company listed in the few search results.

But this is where the problem starts.  Search Engine results differ from Yellow Pages in a two very different ways.

Alphabetical Listing is not relevant to Search Engines.  Hence having a name like AAAcleaners or Aardvark automotive has no benefit on search results.

Secondly, Yellow pages has/had a strict categorization.  Categories were defined such as Cleaning Services etc.   Consumers checked the index to find the category that best correlated to the service they were looking for.  Then they went to that page with the listing of all companies.

However such categories have no real relevance on search engines.  Instead consumers effectively define the category by selecting the words they think best describes what they are looking for.  The more popular or common words they use to find you business service or type we now refer to as key words.

Ad-words and Yellow Pages Advertisements

If you could afford it, you took could also improve you Yellow Pages effectiveness by taking out an on page Advertisement.  Such advertisements were and still are effective.  They attract the consumer eye over a plain text listing.

Search engines have the equivalent of this through the sponsored and AdWords that appear on each of your search results.  The difference is though, that research has shown that people are more likely though to click on a result that the search engine has returned than an adjoining paid add.  My thoughts are that the reason for this is that people tend to “own” the returned results (organic results) because it was their key words that brought them up.

Social Media Effect could be the New Aardvark

Naming your company by giving it multiple Aa’s etc in front helped to get you listed first in the Yellow Pages.  It was a budget way of overcoming the marketing power of the big companies who could afford to take out the big Advertisements.

Social Media in some ways could be argued as being the new low cost way of neutralising the big budgets of major competitors in SEO.  Corporations and major franchises can afford to spend big to make sure that their companies come up first through SEO and through paid on-line advertising.   Social Media though does appear to have the ability to help neutralize this, through the range of free or low cost tools.

SEO for Beginners

SEO is not a simple science!  The rules change frequently and there are numerous companies that specialize in it.

However here are a couple of starters.

Evaluate your own site using the free tool from WebSEO Analytics, it is excellent;

Secondly, if you are serious about at least understanding it, read through the following slide presentation by Alex Conway:

Please send back your comments or thoughts.

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