Optimize Offpage SEO Factors to Boost Search Engine Rankings

Link popularity and link quality can be viewed as the yin and yang of offpage search engine optimization. While not necessary opposing factors, they are absolutely complementary. So, what is your weapon of choice when it comes to improving offpage SEO factors? Should it be a sniper approach that is targeted on focused results? Or, can you blast it with a shotgun and hope for the best? This author packs his sniper rifle when optimizing offpage SEO factors and so should you. Read on to learn about offpage SEO factors and why your website promotion efforts should be highly targeted.

Offpage search engine optimization refers to factors that are not within your web site that affect your search engine ranking. Offpage factors include which sites link to you, the number of sites that link to you, the significance of the web sites that link to you, the anchor text of the link and other elements about the web sites that link to you. Of these offpage factors, the remainder of this article will focus on the two most essential: link popularity and link quality.

Link Popularity

In a nutshell, link popularity refers to the number of links that hyperlink to your web site. These hyperlinks are often called backlinks because they refer to your site. The more backlinks you have the more popular your site appears to the search engine algorithms. You can improve the number of backlinks in several ways including link exchanging, buying one-way text links, promotion articles that contain a link to your website or posting comments to forums or blogs with a signature line that includes a backlink. Which is the best approach? You should use all four techniques, but think like a sniper. Target your efforts on building quality links slowly and steadily over time from popular web sites that are related to your content. Search engines dislike abusive attempts to pump up link popularity especially if done too quickly.

Link Quality

While link popularity is significant, link quality is even more noteworthy. Simply stated, link quality is the reputation of the site linking to you. This reputation includes the significance, relevance, key phrase density, anchor text and several other factors of the referrer. The remainder of this article will focus on these key elements of building link quality.

Significance - Significance refers to the prominence, presence or authority of the referrer. A link from www.cnn.com is significant; a link from www.bobsbackwoodsbarbeque.com is not. Significance should be determined by search engine ranking not Google PageRank. Some think ranking and PageRank are synonymous, but they are not. PageRank is outdated and has little to do with rankings these days. Want proof? Look at the top ten sites for your keyword phrases. You will undoubtedly find more than one entry in the top ten that has little or no PageRank. When searching for significant websites to build up your link popularity, focus on getting backlinks from the top thirty ranking sites for your keyword phrases in each major search engine.

Relevance - Spend your time building links on sites that are related to your website theme. A handful of links from highly ranked websites with related content weigh considerably more than hundreds of links from unrelated insignificant websites. Whether you are exchanging links or buying one-way links from a text link broker, focus only on sites that are relevant to your theme. This author favors the self policing nature of article marketing when it comes to relevance. Here is why. Suppose your web site relates to rock climbing. If you publish an article about the health benefits of rock climbing, only webmasters with fitness or rock climbing web sites are likely to republish your article. Those are exactly the webmasters you want to use your article so you get a related site backlink. It is doubtful that webmasters running car insurance web sites will republish your article. No reason for alarm. Their insurance web site is unrelated and a backlink will have little value. Whichever method you use to build backlinks, focus on relevant sites to get best results.

Anchor Text - Anchor text is the part of a link that people click to get where the link goes. Essentially, it is a way to tell visitors and search engine spiders why the link was made. It describes the target web site. For example, the HTML code for a typical link may look like this:

SEO Information

The anchor text in this example is the 'SEO Strategies' portion of the code. It indicates that the target web site has something to do with SEO information. Search engines pay attention to anchor text and the text surrounding the anchor text. Fortunately, you have some control over this factor when building backlinks. Be sure backlinks pointing to your web site use keyword rich anchor text. Vary the keywords in the anchor text, keep them descriptive and ensure they are related to the theme of your site.

Optimizing offpage SEO factors is fundamental to boosting search engine rankings. You must improve your link popularity to raise your ranking. When doing so, be sure to focus on building high quality links. This will maximize your efforts and help avoid getting penalized from the search engines.

Marcus Pore is an internet marketing consultant offering advice on web site promotion, article marketing and finding top-rated affordable web site hosting at his article directory web sites.

This article is free for reprint but must be reproduced in its entirety including live links and this copyright statement: Copyright © 2007 Marcus Pore

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