Off Page Optimisation

Anything you do to improve your search engine rankings that doesn’t involve making changes to your own website, is known as off page (or off site) optimisation.

Google and the other search engines place great emphasis on off site factors when determining where to position a website within their listings. The reason being that it’s far more difficult to manipulate outside factors than it is to make technical tweaks on your own website.

And the off site optimisation metric that undoubtedly holds the greatest amount of importance is the number and quality of inbound links a website has.

Link Building

Search engines want to rank websites that have the most relevant information towards the top of their listings. And a great way to find those websites is to look at which ones have the most links from other websites for that particular phrase.

Here’s an example:

Say somebody wants to find out all about sunglasses for dogs, so they do a search on Google for ‘dog sunglasses’.

Now Google has to decide in what order to display the many websites that have great information about sunglasses for dogs. So say hypothetically that all of the websites had great information, how could you separate them?

Well, one obvious way would be to look up how many links from other websites each of them have for terms related to ‘dog sunglasses’. It stands to reason, that the website with the most links (i.e. the most endorsements), probably has the best information.

A big part of SEO is ensuring that the website you’re working on has a good number of targeted links so that search engines sees it as an authority on a particular subject. This allows your site to be competitive for a wide range of different keywords.

Linked In

The goal with offsite optimisation is to ensure that your website gets seen and has a presence in as many other places as possible, thus increasing the chances that you’ll get links from other websites to improve your search engine rankings. So whatever clever ways you can come up with to achieve this, constitutes good off page optimisation.

Here are some of the tools you can use to ensure your website achieve visibility to the masses:

• Press Releases – There’s no better way to quickly tell the world about your website than with a press release. Whether it’s to announce an event or an exciting piece of news, it can generate a buzz around your website and most importantly, attract links to improve your rankings.
• Blogs, Forums & Groups – By identifying groups of people that have an interest in the subject that your website is about, you can not only attract visitors directly but also valuable links. Take part in discussions and join online communities. Try not to let people know that you’re just there to market your own site, as that will probably affect your credibility. But if you put in the time and effort, doors can open and opportunities can present themselves.
• Social Sites – Places like Facebook and Twitter are a goldmine for creating interest about your website. By putting the time in to develop a large network of targeted contacts, you’ll be rewarded and have the power to publicise your website to a much wider audience. Patience and timing are key though as you don’t want to appear to be spamming these sites, which can get you kicked off or worse still, damage your website’s reputation and rankings.
• Content Sharing Networks – If you haven’t heard of places like Digg and StumbleUpon, make sure you take the time to learn more about them. These content sharing networks allow to market your website to thousands of people and having the knowledge and capability to make the most of them, can create interest and links incredibly quickly.
• PPC or Other Paid Advertising – By paying to appear either in the search engine listings or on other websites, you can quickly boost the number of people that visit your website. And although you’ve paid for this increased exposure, the links you can generate are all free and potentially very lucrative.
• Offline initiatives – If your company market your products or services using magazine, newspaper, television or radio adverts, you can do lots of clever things to convert this into success with your SEO endeavours. Again, it’s great exposure that can be driven towards encouraging other websites to link to yours.

The Importance of Anchor Text

Getting people to link back to your website is hard enough, but getting them to use one of your targeted keywords as the link text is even more difficult.

However, if you can somehow control the phrases that people use to link to your content, then the SEO success you achieve will be increased significantly.

Here are a few ways you can control link text:

• Titles – The titles of content on your website will often be used as the link text when people are talking about your content. If you’ve optimised your website, your titles should already be perfect for attracting the right link text.
• Direct Contact – If you see that somebody has been kind enough to link to your website, but the link text they’ve used isn’t very good, there’s no harm in sending them an email or getting in touch. Make sure you let them know how grateful you are for the link but ask kindly if they’d mind changing it to the text you had in mind.
• Offer Code – Tell people on your site the link text you’d like them to use by providing them with the code they need to add. Although there’s no guarantee they’ll use it, there certainly isn’t any harm in putting it up there and you might just benefit by getting some quality, targeted links.

Big Bang SEO Off Page Optimisation

At Big Bang SEO, we know all about the many intricacies that go into off page optimisation and can put together a detailed strategy that will ensure people know about your site and link to it.

We’ll come up with innovative ideas to market your content and use all of the latest tools at our disposal to spread the word. And with our experience in the field, we know the techniques that work most effectively.

So if you’re interested in working with Big Bang SEO to improve your website’s search engine rankings, please feel free to contact us for more information.