Off-Page Optimization
In the early days of search engine optimization all you had to do was put keywords in the right places on your web pages and sit back, safe in the knowledge that your page or site would appear high up in the search engines and that thousands of visitors were sure to follow. The keywords had to appear in the title tag, the H1 tag and H2 tag, the description tag, and also had to be scattered liberally throughout the body text. Then there were various html techniques like the table trick to satisfy people who wanted a menu down the left side but also satisfied the search engines which preferred the text near the top of the file. There were other simple procedures that most people knew about. The on-page optimization was the easy bit.
Those good old days ended around late 2004 or early 2005, depending on whose account of things you read in the webmaster forums.
Ever since then the search engines, notably Google, have tried to figure out how relevance can be evaluated more accurately, and with a greater emphasis on putting those websites that appear to have more authority nearer the top of the search engine results pages. The battle for off-page optimization had begun.
Off-page optimization involves getting lots of high authority sites linking to your site. It also involves having relevant keywords in what is called the "anchor text".
Anchor text is the actual text in the hyperlink itself (usually underlined in blue) which is clickable; it is this link that sends the user to the site being referred to. The anchor text should comprise words which are relevant to the theme of the site linked to.
A client came to me recently asking me to do some work on his credit card site. His site
automated the transfer of credit card balances. The user would fill in a short autoresponder which then alerted the card holder just before the 0 interest period of the credit card was about to end, thus enabling the balance to be transferred to a fresh card. This process could be repeated indefinitely, so that the user did not pay interest for years. I decided that the anchor text within this link should be, not surprisingly, automated credit card balance transfer service, and the site now has many thousands of satisfied users.
For those of you interested in how the actual html works (and you should at least be interested in the basics) the code is this:
<a href="http://www.credit-card-transfers.com">automated credit card balance transfer service</a>
The general wisdom that grew up was that the importance of a site could be measured by how many other sites which were similarly themed had links pointing at it. Further, the relevance of a site – in terms of its theme – could be assessed by the anchor text that comprised the link itself. If a website was about buying red widgets then the more links with "buying red widgets" pointing to that site would raise it in the esteem of the search engines. A more natural combination of "red widgets", "buying widgets" and "buy red widgets" in the general mix would further enhance it, because it would not seem to have been artificially optimized (which it probably was anyway).
Whether or not, or how, this yardstick can be improved on will have to be something that the search engines should address, because the present model is far from perfect. (Google thinks that the place which is most about the important term "click here" is the Adobe Acrobat Reader download page, for the linking methodology reasons described above.) But for the moment it looks as if getting lots of good, relevant, non-reciprocal links from as diverse a range of IP addresses as possible, with the absolute avoidance of link farms, web-linking schemes and reciprocal links (which are now all but useless) with relevant keywords in the anchor text, and with a mix of different variations on the keywords, will be the best way of getting high rankings for several years to come. To summarise, to succeed at off-page optimization you will need:
- Lots of relevant links
- Non-reciprocal links
- Links from lots of different "C block" IP addresses indicating no "link farm" approach
- Relevant keywords in the anchor text
- Natural mix of keywords in the anchor text
But getting such links is not an easy matter. The best way to achieve such links in a short space of time is by writing laser-targeted articles and press releases which are well written and have something highly pertinent to say, propagated to the right media sources, followed up over a measured period of time with more articles and press releases to further enhance the link popularity and to keep the website high up in the search engine results pages.
Other ways of obtaining backlinks include contacting webmasters whose sites are similarly
themed but not in competition, and offering to exchange links. However, this results in reciprocal linking, which does not impress the search engines (after all, it's only one webmaster offering to scratch another webmaster's back). More successful cross-linking would involve webmaster A linking his site A to webmaster B's site B, and webmaster B linking back to webmaster A's site C. Then the two webmasters would change roles and cross-link to another indirect combination. And so on. But if the relationship is too cosy, and there are too many cross-linking relationships set up on those addresses, such actions may trip a search engine's red flag.
To elaborate on the definition of a C block, it's important to consider the C block of an IP address in relation to linking, back-linking and cross-linking. A C block is that part of the IP address (the base address of any website) which is the third group of numbers (in the IP address 123.234.55.xxx the C block is 55). Smaller web hosts will only be allocated addresses within the same C block range. So when you register several domains they will all have the same C block identity. So if you link them to each other in any way the search engines will know there is a high chance that this is one webmaster linking to his own web sites to artificially inflate the importance of his site. So if you want to link your sites to each other use different hosting companies for each site.
You can also post on forums, and use a "signature file" with a link back to your website and
appropriate anchor text. This works well as long as your post contributes something to the forum and is not just perceived as being there so that you can post your signature file with the link back to your site "" otherwise this will simply be seen as spamming the forum, in which case your post may be deleted and your membership terminated. There are a number of software applications that blast out forum posts in this manner (although you can usually vary the comment text itself) but I do not recommend them because of the potential damage caused by a perceived spam attack.
You may also leave comments on blog posts in the same way. Again, software is available to automate this and leave lots of comments on lots of related blogs. Again, I do not recommend this software, for the same reasons.
On both blogs and forums the owners of such resources are increasingly using the rel="nofollow" tag to invalidate the link power of any such activity. The nofollow attribute tells the search engines to disregard such links. Therefore there is no point in posting to such sites simply to boost the backlinks to your site.
There are also other methods that can be used such as posting on high-ranking sites using the various new social networking (or Web 2.0) methods. New Web 2.0 procedures are many and varied, and include such things as tagging. These are all too diverse and specific to be treated in this book in any detail.
Links to your site may be left on review sites, in guestbook pages, in classified ad sites, in any one of the hundreds of directories that exist (both general directories and those specific to your subject matter) and there are probably more than a hundred different ways to get these valuable links back to your site. Again, there isn't enough space in this ebook to go into detail about all of them (I see another book coming "" "101 Free Backlink Sources" "" but that's for the future). These are all free, all legitimate, and they all add up to building the authoritative picture that you want the search engines to have of your site. There are just far too many to discuss here and now.
So for the moment let's just consider articles and press releases as a sure and legitimate way of getting links (of the highly valued one-way variety) back to your web site. Links back to the site will come from the article's resource box, or from text within the article body itself where html is enabled. The resource box, like the signature files for forum posts, will be the key to getting your links back to where you want them, with the exact anchor text of your choice.
Articles and press releases have a two-fold enhancing effect on a website. Firstly, the people who read the articles will already have pre-qualified themselves to the theme of the website by searching out the article in the first place, and they will form the first wave of "natural" web traffic that comes from the article to the website. Secondly, the inbound links that come from the sites the article has been published on will enhance the standing of the website in the eyes of the search engines, and this will place the website higher up in the rankings of the search engine results pages. Perhaps even to the first position on page one. This will increase the number of website visitors dramatically.
All this takes long hours and is labour intensive. I do use various software resources to assist me at different stages, but in the end it comes down to sustained, concentrated human effort, and the gaining of experience that shows that the present campaign should be more successful than the last. The results can be highly impressive, even amazing. The following are real life and real-time case studies.
I should stress that "article marketing", which is what the following is, is only one of the many methods that can be used to get quality one-way backlinks to web site. But I've been asked for hard figures, and article marketing affords the quantitative feedback that I can use to illustrate the dynamics of the process, and how gathering backlink works, in real time.
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