If you have spent a vast amount of time optimising your website, with everything correct on the page, its then time to move on and think about what should happen ‘off site’. This can be confusing, as there is so much you could do, but here we will cover 3 simple methods to help you.
It has been said that 30% of SEO is on your website and 70% off your website. I’m to sure how true this is, but we can be certain that off site SEO plays a major part in your rankings in the search engines.
Off site SEO can also be called ‘Link Building’ as this is what we are trying to do. The best kinds of links to have are one way links. This is where another website links to yours, but you don’t link back to it from your own site.
In the past it was recomended to have ‘reciprocal’ links. This is where you link to someone, and they link back. Or links wheels (site 1 links to site 2, site 2 links to site 3 and site 3 links to site 1). Times have now changed and the value of these systems are lower than what they previously were.
So how can we start building backlinks? It’s not an easy task but it’s definitely worth doing, and doing well. Here are some off-page SEO tips:
Tip No.1 Article Marketing
Alot of people get scared when this is mentioned, and wonder where do they start. Well its really quite easy.
Start of by writing 500 to 750 words about your chosen subject. Stuck for ideas of how it should be worded? Read this blog post, it could be used as an article, but decided to make a blog post instead.
Next, go to one of the main article submission websites (ezine for example), and sign up for an account. Submit your article, and sit back and wait. Except, don’t sit back and wait, write another, and another, and another and keep going. Don’t stop with just one article.
If your lucky these articles will be picked up by people and syndicated around the web. This may take some time to happen.
When submitting an article, remember to make full use of the resource box. This can contain a link back to your website, as many article sites don’t allow you to place links in the text of the article.
Tip No.2 Forum Participation
There are many forums about, and cover virtually every subject matter. Join a few that are relevant to your industry, and start joining the conversation.
Many forum let you have a signature. This is what appears in the posts you write, at the bottom. In this you can place a link back to your website. If you know how to code this in (different forums have different codes), you can have the anchor text (the part that is clicked) as one of your main keywords. It may also bring you in more customers as people start to learn what it is you do.
Tip No.3 Blogging
Blogs are great! If your main website is built on a blogging software like WordPress, or you main site is HTML, and you get a free blogger blog, it dosen’t matter. The important thing is to keep posting new, relevant and unique content, as often as you can. We recommend that if you have a blog, you submit to it at least once a week.
If your feeling brave, you can have more than one blog. There are many companies online now that offer these free blogs (including ourselves).
Make sure the content you post is relevant to your industry, and contains links, not just to your site, but to others as well. Otherwise the search engines know that you have made that blog just to build links to your site. Where as, if you link to somewhere else as well in each post (for example wikipedia, yahoo answers, BBC, Amazon etc), it looks better to the search engines. Plus you can always find a word or phrase you have written to use to link to one of the big sites.
The secret to be successful in carrying out these off-site SEO methods is to be consistent.
- Submit quality articles to article directories at least once a week.
- Regularly produce unique content for your blog.
- Participate regularly on Forums.
And, if you discover that you don’t enjoy doing off site SEO, there’s always a plan B – hire us to do it for you!