The Beginner’s Guide to SEO: Onpage and Offpage Optimization (Part 2)

On-page optimization will improve your website’s positions but you can’t achieve top rankings with on-page optimization only. To get your website to the top, off-page optimization is needed. In fact it is the off-page optimization that can get your website to the top. But this does not mean that on-page optimization can be ignored because off-page optimization is far more effective when on-page optimization is in place.

Off-page Optimization

Off-page optimization concentrates on increasing the number of backlinks. Backlinks or inbound links mean the links to your website from other websites. The more websites linking to your site, the higher your website’s positions will be. There are actually two types of backlinks:

1) One-way link – A relevant website links to your webpage without requiring a link back from you.

2) Reciprocal link – The owner of a relevant website agree to place a link to your website and in exchange you provide a link back to the owner.

Search engines weight more heavily on one-way links than reciprocal links.

Other important off-page factors you need to pay attention are:

1) Anchor text used in the link pointing to your website.

2) The Google page rank (PR) of the website linking to you.

Anchor Text

When you exchange link with another site, you will need to provide your website’s title that will be placed on the link exchange partner’s website. The website’s title will be a clickable link to your website and the clickable link is called anchor text. You anchor text should contain your targeted keyword.

Google Page Rank (PR)

You can see the Google page rank of a website using Google toolbar. Here’s the link to download and install Google toolbar.

http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/toolbar/index.html

Page rank shouldn’t be ignored when building backlinks. The more high page rank relevant websites (websites that have content related yours) linking to you the faster your website will reach top ranking in Google.

In order to rank high, you need to build as many backlinks as possible. But don’t grow your backlinks too fast as Google may de-index your website for this reason. There are no specified guidelines by Google of how many inbound links you can build daily. Based on my experience it is safe to have 5 to 10 backlinks per day.

There are several ways to get backlinks to your site. Here’s how……

Send Link Exchange Requests to Potential Links Partners

Before starting a link exchange campaign. You need to create a link directory that will be used to provide a link back to your potential link partners. Your website is ready to exchange link with other webmasters once the directory created.

You can find your potential link partners by searching on major search engines like Google and Yahoo for your targeted keywords and then visit each website in top 100 or top 200 listings. Make sure that the site you are requesting a link exchange related to yours. When a potential link partner has been found, you will want to go ahead and add your potential partner’s link to the appropriate category in your site’s link directory and then send an email to the potential link partner stating:

a) That you have linking to your potential link partner.

b) A direct link to the page where the potential link partner listing can be found.

c) How it would benefit to the potential link partner’s if linking to you.

d) Your linking details.

To achieve better result, you should not get backlinks to your home page only. Try to get links pointing to your other webpages too. Also use more than one keyword anchor text.

Article Marketing

Writing several articles and submitting them to article directories for publication is a great way to build one-way links. By including a link to your website in your articles resource box, you not only gain quality one-way links but also drive free targeted traffic to your site. Your articles may drive truckloads of traffic if they are impressive. There are hundreds of article directories if not thousands. You can find them by going to Google and entering the search term ‘article directories’.

Directories

Submitting your website’s link to directories is another way of getting backlinks. Directories normally offer 3 types of listings:

1) Paid listing

2) Free listing

3) Free listing but require a link back from you.

If you choose the first or third option and your website meets the submission guidelines and rules of the directories, your link will usually be listed within days. If you select the second option, you have to wait longer and your website’s listings aren’t guaranteed.

Getting listed in quality directories with Google page rank 7 or higher such as DMOZ and Yahoo directory can be more beneficial for increasing your rankings than a lot of links from smaller and newer directories. But it is not easy to be accepted by these quality directories.

Press Release

Press release is simply an announcement of an important event for your business. Just like article marketing, you can gain one-way links by writing a press release with a link pointing to your site and submitting it to other websites. To find websites that accept press release, you can go to Google and enter the search term ’submit press release’.

Affiliate Program

If you are selling a product or a membership service, launching an affiliate program is a good idea to increase both your inbound links and online sales. Webmasters that are interested to market your product will place your link on their websites and you get free one-way links.

Click here to go back to part 1 of this article.