Off-Site SEO refers to search engine optimization techniques that are not performed on your own website or page, and are therefore termed "off-site."
You see, these days, optimizing the content on your pages is not enough. For effective SEO you need help from other websites in the form of incoming links, commonly referred to as backlinks.
That's basically what off-site SEO is all about – getting quality links relevant to your topic to assist the search engines in establishing what your web page focuses on. You can think of each backlink as a vote for your page. This is what Google's PageRank measures, albeit in a complex way, taking many factors into consideration.
How To Get Backlinks
There are many ways to get backlinks; unfortunately, few of them are quick and easy. Here are some options:
- Creating content that makes people link to it
- Doing link exchanges
- Getting directory listings
- Writing and syndicating articles
- Making forum postings
- Posting comments to theme related blogs
- Buying links
What's in a Link
One link from a high quality site is worth tens from a poor site. And linking to bad sites can negatively effect your own website's rankings.
One-way links into your website from another are of greater value than reciprocal links from carrying out link exchanges.
Links to your pages should use the relevant keywords in the anchor text. Use several variations on this text if you plan to create a high number of backlinks to a page. You'll get better results and it looks more natural to the search engines, keeping you below the radar.
Link Exchange Networks
It's generally best to avoid organized link exchanges or link farms. In the vast majority of cases they will harm, not help you. This is because the search engines see it as manipulation of the SERPS (Search Engine Results Page) and punish linked websites when they discover the network, by dropping them down the rankings.
Having given you that warning, it's only fair to tell you that hidden amongst all those that either don't work or are highly risky, there are in fact a small number of backlink building networks online that have proven to be safe and effective.
You get hundreds of valuable inbound links, whilst the network remains below the radar and undetectable. The number of links to your sites grows steadily over time and so appears natural, albeit accelerated from your perspective. This is important since suddenly getting hundreds of backlinks tells Google and other search engines that you're probably doing something they don't like. All those backlinks in turn enable you to attain top search engine rankings for lots of different keywords.
Of course it's impossible to be 100% certain that a particular link network will never be discovered, simply because we don't know what the future may bring in terms of search engine technology. However, it's a good bet that the most successful backlink networks today will continue to keep pace with future search engine developments.
In any case, in most scenarios you probably won't want or need to use a link building service on a website forever, but only until it gains the visibility required for it to take off.
Top Choices
Two services that work extremely well, but in completely different ways are NextGen Links, and Article Underground. In my opinion these are not only the safest to use, but also offer the best value for money in terms of the quantity and quality links you receive, and the top-notch service provided.
NextGen Links has the most advanced system anywhere, offering completely automatic, one way relevant contextual links, that can be integrated with your site in innumerable ways. It also boasts an amazing interface. Both services happen to be amongst the cheapest as well, which is a nice bonus!
Links From RSS Feeds
Although often overlooked, distributing RSS feeds is a great link-building strategy. Seeding RSS aggregators with your feeds offers the unique benefit of automatically creating hundreds of new backlinks for your site every time you add some new content.
Unfortunately, doing it manually can be painfully slow. Another difficulty is that unless your web site is a blog, you probably don't know how to create an RSS feed for it anyway. Of course, being the internet, there are automated solutions available.
RSS Power Plus Pro is the only software that solves both problems and works on both blogs and static websites. It's the most advanced, and will bring you the best results. Yet it's also one of the cheapest options, and really easy to use. Just set it and forget it. RSS Power Plus Pro builds links for you 24/7 in the background while you get on with your life.
Ignoring Off-Site SEO Isn't An Option
Whatever you want to do to get backlinks, make sure you do something! Don't underestimate how important off-site SEO is.
Good backlinks with targeted keyword anchor text carry so much weight these days that if done well it's entirely possible to get high search rankings for terms not even occurring on the page.
The advice on SEO in these 2 articles is all you need to start getting your pages ranking highly for traffic generating keywords. You just need to get on and do it, and be prepared to spend the time good off-site SEO requires. The more high rankings you get, the greater their influence on your overall rankings, and the easier it will become to tackle more difficult keyword phrases.
