Off Page SEO: Introduction
Off-Page SEO can be described as anything you do external of your site to build your search engine rankings. This usually involves building links to your website using your main keyword as the anchor text for those links.
In the process of having other sites link to you, you can the work of the other webmaster easier and at the same have your say on what your anchor text says by preparing the link code and sending it to the other webmaster to place on his site.
If you have a basic understanding of HTML, you will know what an anchor text is (text in-between your anchor tags) as shown below:
<a href="http://www.marybeads.com">Anchor Text</a>.
In actual sense, it is other webmasters adding links to your site from your site. Your role here is to initiate the process, because you have no control over what other sites do. You either request for a link exchange (and to expedite the process, add a link to their site), or request for a link, or pay for a link (another way of advertising your site, but in this case, you are targeting improved search engine rankings through increasing the number of links pointing to your site, rather than the direct traffic that this link brings you, which is an added bonus).
Apart from what is on your site (which search engines owners obviously have no time to read billions of web pages), search engines rely on human feedback/opinion to figure out the quality of a site (content wise mostly). It is in the interest of search engines to feature high quality sites in their search engine results, so that visitors will not get pissed off by the quality of results and move to another search engine to continue their search.
In human edited directories (like NigeriaGalleria etc), human editors actually visit each submitted site to check it out to confirm that it satisfies its listing guidelines before it is added. Since search engines is almost "everybody come inside", they have to rely indirectly on webmasters to decide which site is good and which one is not so good.
This is the logic. Search engines regard a link from one site to another as a recommendation or vote for that site. It means that site is good, that is why you are recommending it to your visitors by linking to it (which means you want your visitors to also check out that site). In a way, you are putting your reputation on the line, because if the site is rubbish, visitors will not trust other links on your site..
So in the eyes of search engines, a link is a vote. So the more votes (links) a site attracts, the greater the chances that the site is important and good quality. So in the final analysis, the more links you have (with your keywords in the anchor text), the higher you will rank in the search engines.
Using off-page SEO (link strategy) will account for most of your search engine results and is where you should spend 80% of your time if you want to rise the rankings quickly. When developing a linking campaign it is best to use not just one method but multiple methods, this way if one method stops working, you always have backups.
The different methods linking:
· Reciprocal Linking
· One-Way Links
· Three - Way Links
Return to Guide to Starting Your Home Based Internet Business Index
