Off-page Optimization

What is Off Page SEO? 

Off page SEO or search engine optimisation is doing things off site to improve your sites search engine rankings. The only thing you can do off site to incraese your rankings is build up more links. More links will generally lead to better Google PageRank and better search engine rankings.


When you are trying to get more links you need to think about quality, not all links are created equal and links from low quality sites will have little or no impact on your rankings. The best types of links that you can get are from trusted sources such as universities, newspapers and even some of the top notch directories such as dmoz and Yahoo.

It is sometimes difficult to spot the good links; here are a few questions you should ask yourself when you are looking at sites or pages to get links from:

• Is this site or page relevant to what I do?
  
  
• Is this site linking out to any low quality off topic sites?
  
  
• Is this site or page going to send the right sort of traffic?
  
  
• Is this site or page ranking well in the search engines?
  
  
• Does this site have a lot of links from other websites?
  

Another important factor is the way that the sites link to you, sites that use the rel=nofollow tag to link to you or sites that use a redirect to link to you will not help you, also the search engines look at the text that links to you, if you are trying to rank for the phrase blue widgets and you can get a site to link to you including that phrase in the text or alt tag of the link then that is going to help you to rank higher for that particular phrase.

These things have to be done after the completion of on-page SEO. Before doing these things you must be aware of your competitors who can able build a negative reputation against your company/website.

1. Directory Submission

Many people may say that directory submission is dead. As far as I'm concerned it is still alive. It is purely based on how effectively we are selecting those directories and how efficiently we are choosing the category for submission. Of course, I agree that it gives quite delayed results, but it is worth doing it. Submit your websites to the topmost quality directories like DMOZ, Yahoo Directory, ZoomInfo, One Mission, Pegasus, etc. Nowadays many web directories may offer paid listings but don't go for it.

2. Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking is yet another powerful way of promoting your website, but nowadays most people are spamming social bookmarking sites without knowing how to use them. Since content in these websites update frequently, search engines like these types of sites and often visit them (this is commonly termed as Tagsonomy & Folksonomy in Web 2.0). Do some social bookmarking in popular bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Propeller, etc. You should be very careful while doing this and you must properly handle the tags which are very essential to broadcast your news on a wide area network. This may increase your website traffic based on how effectively you have participated.

3. Article Submission

Write articles of your own and submit them to popular article sites like Ezine, Go Articles, Now Public, Buzzle, etc. This will help you to attain some deep links for your website (though it's usually a slower process).

4. Press Release Promotion

If you are a business/service provider then go for PR submission in popular PR websites like 1888pressrelease, Open PR, PR Leap, etc. This will help you to publish your site in Google News.

5. Classifieds Submission

Do some classifieds submissions to advertise your products for free. Try Craigslist and other major classifieds sites like Kugli, Myspace, iMadespace, Vivastreet, etc.