Off-site SEO Tips - The Power of Links

Search Engine Optimisation is made up of two key elements, on-page and off-page optimisation. On-page optimisation is the manipulation of on-page website elements and streamlining them to enhance your keyword relevance. Site structure, content and tags within the website code (meta tags, alt tags and title tag) are all on-page elements you can control by weaving relevant keywords through. This is the easiest step of the search engine optimisation process and should be done throughout the design and building stage of the project.

Off-page SEO is by far the most challenging aspect and is an ongoing process that occurs for the entire life of your website. Off-page SEO is the process of building external links to your website, helping build domain authority and external relevance between keyword and landing page. Links are important because in the eyes of the search engine, they act as credible "votes" for your website… the more sites that link to you, the more "votes" you have and the more authority your site carries.

Links also improve your domains' PageRank. PageRank is a number assigned to websites by Google as a means of determining the score of your domain name and web pages. The purpose of PageRank is to measure the relative importance of a website in relation to the external links it has acquired. As links come into a root domain (or homepage) of your site, the PageRank is then distributed across all pages of the website by following the internal link structure of you site.

Link building comes in various forms, including online directories, reciprocal linking, article writing, blog posts and forums. The key thing to remember is to use the correct anchor text in your links.

One of the best examples of off-page SEO is Adobe Acrobat reader. If you search for the phrase "click here", you will see that the first result is Adobe Acrobat reader, yet if you go to that page, you won’t find the phrase "click here" mentioned at all. How can that be?

Try and remember any website you have been to that has PDF file downloads. There will always be a message which asks you to download Adobe Acrobat reader in order to view the PDF document. The message you will always see is "If you don't have Adobe Acrobat Reader on your computer, click here to download it." Their ranking is achieved solely by the power of using the "click here" anchor text, as millions of websites will use this phrase to link to the Adobe Acrobat site.

Hopefully these off-site tips will give you an insight into the importance of link building and will give you some ideas of where to start. It takes time to build up a good link portfolio, so remember to be patient as it won't happen overnight.  Monitor your search engine rankings regularly so you have an understanding of which links carry the most weight and have the most effect on your rankings. This will help you focus on link building strategies that work.