�Search Engine Optimization� or SEO is when you undertake efforts to improve your website�s rating amongst the global competition in the virtual world. It involves certain techniques (On Page SEO and Off Page SEO) that help your website to gain a position among the top search results when users seek information on search engines related to the content offered by your website.
This traffic-generating approach operates and ranks your content on the basis of �relevance�, i.e. how relevant your website content is in comparison with other similar websites on different search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing. For example, if you enter any query related to financial management in a search engine, you get a large number of results, often extending through countless pages.
Normally, users do not consider all the search results other than those at the top of the list, as they believe that those are the most relevant to their requirements. This is the reason why websites strive to attain those top positions � to attract as many users and as much traffic from search engines as possible.
As mentioned before, there are two main types of SEO that a blogger or any website manager should be aware of, namely �On Page SEO� � which involves the content and structure of a blog or a website itself, the quality and relevance of which helps the website gain rankings among others - and �Off Page SEO� � which can also be referred to as �Backlinking� or �Link Building� � in which you generate traffic on your site through links from other websites. It basically means making an effort and doing things �off the site� in order to improve website rankings on search engines. Building more links to your own website on other web pages helps your site gain good rankings, for instance on Google PageRank. Let�s have a close look at what is off page SEO?
Basic Techniques For Off Page SEO
Quality of Links/Website
One thing should be kept in mind, your website rankings do not merely depend on the number of links to your website instead they are also affected by the quality of those links. For example, a link from a trusted source such as a website of a reputable university or a renowned company will certainly help you get the best links and considerably improve your website ratings. There are several factors to be considered while deciding to get links from a certain website, such as:
�The relevance of that website to your own content
�The ranking of the website itself
�The type of traffic it is expected to generate or send to your website
�Whether that website has links from other websites as well; if yes, then what kind of links (quality of those websites to which it has links)
Content Sharing on Websites
Other off-the-site methods include submitting articles to Article Directory Sites and sharing content on different websites in order to promote your website or online business. These include free article submission sites such as www.articlesbase.com, as well as social networks (e.g. Facebook and Twitter), image and video-sharing sites (e.g. Youtube.com), posting on forums, and bookmarking websites such as Digg.com and Delicious.com among various others.
Pay Attention to URL Content
Avoid making links and URLs that appear to be suspicious or spam; users are not likely to proceed if a URL consists of a lot of words or hyphens. It is best to keep it short and include the main keywords only.
Networking Is The Key!
Commenting on other people�s blogs � especially giving positive and professional comments � and participating in forum discussions can lead to people visiting your website to check out your content as well. Apart from that, it can also help you to congregate different ideas from these sources to make your own content even better. However, again you should be careful in choosing a forum that is related to your own work or field, so that you are in a position to help and guide people on these forums through your expertise and know-how.
Create Link Wheels
Creating a Link Wheel is another off page SEO strategy that proves to be quite effective. This off-the-site technique involves creating several blogs and sites on a very small scale on popular web 2.0 sites such as Blogger.com, on any particular topic, and then including in that blog/site one link to your main website, and another link to the other blog/site that you have created. These are one-way links, for example one link on a particular blog will take you to another blog that you have created, but not back to it. In other words, value is passed from each subsequent link to the other until all of it reaches to your main website. Therefore, graphically it looks like a wheel with the spokes being the other blogs and websites, whereas the middle part being your main website.
Set Up RSS Feeds
Setting up RSS feeds for your website would help in generating traffic to your website whenever you post some new content or material on it, which in turn would increase its ranking on the internet.
Selecting and implementing an ideal Off Page SEO strategy depends on your feasibility as well as your resources, and requires careful evaluation of which one might be best suited to your needs and nature of work. So choose wisely, as the success of your venture depends on it! Hopefully, the above information would have clarified what is off page SEO.