Off-site Search Engine Optimizing: What To Do?
Written by Stefan Vervoort on September 22, 2007
As I wrote an article on On-site search engine optimizing, I thought it was time to write one on Off-site SEO work as well. This article will cover the basic points, as I’m not a professional in SEO work either. In some time, I’ll write a new one, with some more and handy tips to get you great and valuable backlinks.
So what’s the basic idea behind Off-site search engine optimizing? Google always wanted to provide their users with the best and most relevant search results. So they developed a system called PageRank. This system splits important websites from the not-important ones. It tracks the important websites by finding out how many websites are linking to the site. Example: When one site, On-site optimized for the keyword web articles, with 1000 backlinks, will be ending up higher on the search query web articles then a website, optimized for the same keyword, with only 10 backlinks. Do you understand the principle? If not, read Wikipedia.
What’s included?
- Create great content
- Link exchange
- Directory submission
- Forum signatures
Create great content
I think great content is a good way to create a great website. You can be the best in SEO and let your website rank high on the search engines. People will find your website, but what if they don’t find anything useful for them? They will leave right away and might find a website with more information. I think you should find a balance between SEO work and content writing. After all, you are writing your content and/or articles for your visitors (well, I am).
There are enough websites out there who are looking to provide the best resources for their visitors. People with those websites might find your article an interesting add-on for their website and visitors and add a link to your article or website. There you have a quality backlink, because you’ll receive a link from a website with the same subject. Another thing that’s great from such a link is that it isn’t a link exchange, but a one-way link. SE’s will see those links as a greater valuable one.
Link exchange
You definitely aren’t the only website out there with the same subject. Why not make use of this and email the owners of the other sites, with the question to do a link exchange. You’ll add their links to your website, and they’ll add yours to their sites. What’s the problem with that? As you read before, one-way links are more valuable as a link exchange, but this is a great way to receive links to.
So, how can you do this? Well, search Google or any other search engine with the subject of your website! When you find some, send them a professional looking email and ask for a link exchange. But, you should be realistic. Large websites might not be interested in having your link on their website, because you don’t have much to offer them for now. But you can try it right? You might be lucky and get a link from someone with a Pagerank 6 website.
Directory submission
Another way to get you a few backlinks is to add your website to directory websites with pagerank 4+. Of course, the higher the pagerank, the better your backlink is. Don’t get too excited: there are free directories, as well as paid ones. Paid ones usually have the best ‘deeplink’.
Let me explain what ‘deeplinks’ are. As the word suggest, they are links ‘deeper’ inside the website. Example; When you have the homepage and you should click on the category ‘Web’, and after that you go to the subcategory ‘Web development’. The homepage has pagerank 6, the category ‘Web’ has pagerank 3 and the subcategory ‘Web development’ has pagerank 1. Page 5 of this subcategory has pagerank zero. Page 5 of this subcategory is a good example of what a deeplink is.
Your link on that page does a little, or doesn’t improve your pagerank at all. Google might not even spider the link and it’ll not call the link a backlink to your website.
What you can do to get a couple good directories is to find someone who wants to do it for you. They usually have a good and complete list of directories where you should add your website too. After they manually added them to the directories, you’ll get a report on what they did. It’ll cost you almost nothing, 5$ for 200 directories submissions, while saving you a lot of work.
Forum signatures
I’ve picked up a great tip lately. I know it was handy to be using forum signatures for Search Engine Optimizing. You might have been to forums in the past, where you enjoyed hanging out and posted often. Digg up your username and password! When having 2000 posts, they all include a signature. When you add a link to your website in your signature, the forum will automatically update the signature on all those pages you posted on. You can understand, when having 2000 posts, this will make a whole lot pages linking to your website.
When you didn’t have any of these accounts, why not make an account on a couple communities and participate in all different subjects. The best is to find communities with the same subject as your own website. This increases your knowledge in that subject and when you use a good signature, with a couple links, it’s good for your own website too. You might even get some extra visitors from those signatures.
Conclusion
As you can read, these are a couple smart tips to help you boost your Pagerank and search engine position. Of course, there are a lot more techniques, but these are great to start with. When you have enjoyed reading this, read my article on Onsite Search Engine Optimizing as well, because that’s a good attentions point too. Thanks for reading and watch out for the next one.
This article is written by:
Name: Stefan Vervoort
URL: http://www.divitodesign.com
Description: I am a 18-year-old webdesigner and blogger from Waalwijk, the Netherlands. I also blog at WPTOY and work at DivitoMedia.
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thanks for this helpful techniques! i began to revisit all the forums i joined and changes my signature to my website url! i also started to participate in any forum that holds my interests. it took me much time after i came back to this blog of yours to leave this message! thanks again.
[...] you develop your websites as they become visible in the search engines. Remember, you should do offsite SEO work too. Let me know what are your thoughts on this subjects, and possible [...]
offfsite optimization is too important .really it works for good ranking & quality traffic of a website.
The forum posting idea is excellent, I cant believe we’ve never thought of it before, thank you
Thanks, I picked it up some time ago as well!
This is a nice blog. I believe that off page techniques are equally as important as tweaking your keyword phrases on your pages. It’s a good idea to use your keyword phrase in your anchor text in your inbound links. Doing your keyword research is very important.
My site, http://www.link-exchangers.com can help you get relevant link partners for your site. It will give you the mechanism to capture those people browsing your site who would like a link. It makes it very easy for them to get a link to your site and have it immediately available in the category of their choice.
This is a very great tips,
but remember some forum only allowed account that reach certain post to access view to signature and/or view to signature’s link,
which will give result that almost equal to zero.
search optimization is a good topical subject right now
Link building is definitley your most important off-site optimization technique. There are a lot of companies out there offering link building at a price but there are also things you can do on your own at no cost, just time.
Hi. I want to say to you somethings about optimization. Optimization or optimality is a term that may refer to:
Optimization (mathematics), trying to find maxima and minima of a functionOptimization (computer science), improving a system to reduce runtime, bandwidth, memory requirements, or other property of a system; in particularCompiler optimization, improving the performance or efficiency of compiled codeSearch engine optimization, in internet marketing, methodologies aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listingsProcess optimization, in business and engineering, methodologies for improving the efficiency of a production processProduct
once again very helpful
Thanks for the information. A simple and clear explanation of off site SEO.
Hi,
Don’t forget about article submissions to. They can get you some great related content anchored text links, too!
Shaw
@Shaw – Didn’t use article submissions just yet, but I might do so in the future. Thanks!
And blog comments of course. They can leave excellent links pointing to your site as well. And Social Bookmarking sites.
If you ask yourself which links are the best to have, stop wondering. You need them all! The best situation is to have a NATURAL mixture of all kinds of links, low PR, high PR, do follow, no follow, text, images, etc. Work in a natural way and drop your URL if you feel it is the right place to do so. Keep it natural and don’t SPAM!
thanks for these tips! hopefully i can get my serps ranking up
The mystical part is discovering how to make the backlinks recognized by Google.
Great thanks for tips! They are really nice!
Some great tips here, thankyou for the article! In response to linkpartner (26/12) – Google seems to have decided they don’t want to show people their backlinks. What once showed up for many of my sites are now only available through Yahoo.
In my experience, I regularly use either Yahoo to check links or Google Webmaster tools (I still consider this incomplete tho).
easily the best way to get quality ‘do follow’ links from high ranking pages is to use a piece of software from g-lock which finds blogs and ranks pages by links out etc. And no, I dont own the company, just use the software
lyndon
SEO Company Leeds
Some very useful ideas here thankyou very much! The forum signature idea is one I’ve never considered before. Thanks.
Thanks for a great article – the idea on Forum signatures was particularly useful as I’d never really considered doing this before. SEO is without a doubt an ongoing task! Again, Thanks for the post Stefan!
No problemo, glad to help.
A great article, should prove very helpful with my efforts to promote my directory. Thankyou!
OMG wow, I knew it was good having your website in your signature, but I didn’t remember that it would be how many post you’d made, that many links! So 1000 post = 1000 links.
These techniques are damn good and very well explained and easy to follow. I bookmark this article for future reference. Keep posting good stuff.
You have included everything. You must add about building links via Blogs which is very popular now days.
Very well written keep up the good work.
The less traveled road to getting more links: Quality content. Want links? Create content that is ‘link-worthy’. Hiring a quality author for an article can seem like more money up front, but the long term results show the stability and traffic.