SEO Stage 2 - The off-site work

The Rationale behind Off-site SEO

Once the on-site work has been completed, that is, the site is populated with original content and the keyword density, meta tags and descriptions are complete it is time to focus on link popularity. Google takes the view that if lots of sites are linking to your content then it must be good and accordingly will move the site up the search rankings. However, the Google algorithms are far more sophisticated than just looking at how many links. It is all about the quality and the relevance of the links. If you have 1000 links from non-indexed pages from websites that have no correlation to yours then these are verging on being of no value.

Conversely if you have a single link from a website which has a similar theme and the link is from a page with a page rank of 4, then this link will positively help your search position rankings. This link will give you a 2 fold benefit. Firstly it will show that your site is valued and this will give a small boost to any search terms, Secondly and more significantly it will give a tremendous boost to the search term used in the anchor text to the link which means that you need to ensure that the anchor text is matched to your target keywords.

Now that's the basic philosophy behind link popularity but the question is how do you achieve this?

Off-site Linking Campaign

The ideal way to get high quality links is to create great content and this will naturally encourage other sites to link to yours. This is certainly the Google thought plan and there is no doubt about it this certainly will happen. The issue for most webmasters is that this process is normally too slow and it may take years for the website to naturally attract these great links.

Without a shadow of doubt the best way to complement this is to target sites with comparable content and get in touch with the webmasters and look towards enticing them to link to your site potentially with a 3 way reciprocal links plan if you can find 2 potential partners. This ring of links will give a more natural linking than a straight exchange program between 2 websites which google is viewed not to favour as much.

This strategy of linking certainly is optimal but is best boosted by complementary techniques.
The first one of these is to use article sites. Write some original articles to promote your site or products ensuring that you use a keyword density of between 2% and 5% for the keyword you wish to target. Then ensure that you have a link back with this keyword in the anchor text within the article. Articles need to be say 300-600 words in length and of original content. You can then publish to a range of article sites starting with most highly regarded, Ezine Articles and then utilising the vast array of others like Article Dashboard to promote your site. Once the articles are approved and indexed you should see and improvement in the search listing position for the chosen keywords.

The next complementary technique is to create short videos with a link back and publish these to the main video sites like You Tube. Google loves these sites and Will index really fast which will give you a good link back. The other key benefit here is if you create a good video it is also a great advertisement for your site and products.

The next part is to use social bookmarking to find people that have a common interest in your website objectives and then through Twitter, Facebook etc. start to create a community of people have common interests.

Another technique which is used is Profile Pages which are the pages on Web 2,0 sites where you can register. By careful selection of these sites you can then create profile pages with relevant content and linkbacks to your website.

So there we have a brief overview of some of the major techniques which are used by the SEO companies or ones which you can use yourself. Now the success of your plan is all down to the care, thought and dedication that you put into the process and a well devised SEO plan should give lasting results. But make sure that your approach is not spammy or unnatural because you will definitely be penalised for that so if you are unsure then it is probably best to leave it to an expert IT Services company.