Off Page SEO Part 1
On page SEO can be thought of as preparation. Once you have your site submitted to the engines and nicely optimised, it’s time to maximise your ranking. Building backlinks (links to your website from others) will be the crux of your off page SEO efforts. Problem is, Google have ways of determining the worthiness of the ’votes’ your website receives from others. The ’vote’ analogy is commonly used in this context since a link to your website from an another can be seen almost as a thumbs up: another site telling the search engines that your content is worth indexing.
Links from other sites can drive direct, targeted traffic in themselves, but they also have significant benefits when it comes to SEO. You will have heard terms like PageRank before and you’ve probably been taught that backlinks from old, established websites with high PageRank are the be all and end all. Whilst this has some truth, you need to be a little more street wise if you’re to stretch your budget.
You have to be clever with your backlinking strategy. Remember, Google hate paid links. They distort the democratic backlink system which serves as the foundation of their rankings. One way to obtain links is to produce quality content and make use of press releases and other marketing tools, but let’s stick to SEO for now. If you’re going to buy links you have make it seem natural. This is the fallback with links from high PageRank sites. Not only are they generally expensive to purchase but they set alarm bells ringing at the search engines. Why would a relatively new site suddenly be inundated with ‘votes’ from the internet’s authority websites?
If you want to push your budget and achieve the best results, you’re better off gradually scaling up the PageRank of the sites you buy links from. At the start of your campaign you want to target backlinks from PR0 and PR1 websites until you see results, before scaling up. This is more cost effective too. One little trick I’ve learnt is to favour PR0 over PR1. This may seem illogical but there’s a good reason. When buying text links look for PR0 sites with high link popularity (use this tool: http://www.iwebtool.com/link_popularity?domain=speedsubmit.info). PR0 sites with lots of backlinks in Yahoo are likely to obtain a high PR at the next update, whilst PR1 sites have already been awarded a relatively low PageRank. Using this strategy you can gain links from reputable sites at cut down prices, because although they are well established, Google haven’t yet awarded an appropriate PageRank.
It isn’t just the PageRank of your link partners you need to be aware of in making your campaign seem natural to the search engines. At the beginning of a campaign you also need to be conscious of link placement speed. Again, if you were a search engine it would certainly arouse your suspicion if an unrecognised site suddenly obtained several thousand backlinks almost overnight. You need to be aware of the need to gradually ‘scale up’ your campaign. In your first month run perhaps 50 backlinks, analyse your results at the end then consider increasing that number.
My final point is actually very closely related to the practice of keyword stuffing - an on page strategy of overusing a particular keyword in the hope of being ranked. It simply does not work. The same applies to your backlinks. When another site links to you, the link itself will be a short extract of text (the anchor text). This text is hugely important in effective SEO. DO NOT use the same anchor text for all your links. You must produce a list of variations to use as anchor text (and ideally you won’t use the same anchor text for more than 10-15 backlinks). Let’s assume you’re running a search engine submission business, just like Speed Submit. You might think ’search engine submission’ is the ideal anchor text but if overused, the search engines won’t hesitate to penalise. It is well worth the 10-15 minutes spent producing suitable variations. For example:
SEO and Website Promotion
Search Engine Experts
SEO Tips and Tools
Online Marketing Specialists
I would compile a list similar to this, but in greater depth, then use them all equally as anchor texts. This will look natural to the search engines and will inevitably improve rankings.
