Off-Page SEO
From The Yaffe Center
Google search algorithm is designed to consider more about what others say about your webpage than what you say about yourself. Therefore, links from other websites is the most important factor to determine pagerank. This is based on the premise that links from other website is a sign of trust and reliability.
[edit] Characteristics of high quality links
One-way links are better than links where both your site and the referring site have a circular link. When the text is the actual link to your page and the text is the keyword. Also, it is better if the linking page – the page referring to your site - has many links linking to it.
Using Google you can find how many sites are linking to your. Perform the query in Google: link:www.DomainName.com and you can see the webpages linking to you site.
[edit] How and where to get links
You can use sites such as Yahoo, BOTW.org, Business.com, and others to build links to your site. In addition, publications and news organization to link to your site is always an effective way to build high quality links. Highly sought after links such as breaking news, controversies, viral contents act as link bait for other sites.
Be proactive with your partners and sponsors to link the most up to date and relevant pages of your website.
[edit] Blogs and social media
It is a cliché but creating viral and creative contents are most effective in driving links via social networks. If more and more people are listing your site using Digg and others it improves the search rankings. Pay attention to your blog comments, feedback, reviews etc which improves the SEO performance
Blogs are built for SEO Blogs are highly effective tools that can enhance SEO strategies today as well as over the long term in a broad variety of ways. Working with bloggers, as well as launching and maintaining one or several blogs, are tactics every SEO strategist should consider.
Blog platforms are built for search. Although content, names, tags, links, and all those other good things count, blog platforms have plenty of optimization advantages baked into them from the start. Blog structure and architecture offer a baked-in SEO platform. In fact, many commercial sites—including publishers—have recently started migrating entirely to commercially available blog platforms rather than building their own web properties on more traditional (not to mention much more expensive) content management platforms.
Blog platforms are built for search.
Basically, all blogging software packages are simple content management systems (CMS). Here are a few reasons blogs can be compared to a CMS:
•Blog platforms make it easy to add new pages, while at the same time integrating those pages into a site’s navigational structure.
•Blogs and blog posts are naturally search-friendly because they’re text-rich and link-rich.
•Blogs and blog posts also logically structure and categorize content.
•In a best-case scenario, blogs are frequently updated.
•The URL structure of blogs is simple and search-friendly.
•Blogs contain very little extraneous HTML code to trip up search engine spiders and crawlers.
•Blogs encourage linking—often, lots of linking. Blogs (and bloggers) tend to include far more outbound links in their content than do “traditional” web properties.
Following are some ways in which blogs should be part of your SEO strategy:
•Inbound links: Because bloggers tend to link so freely to one another as well as to news, social media, and websites, external blogs are a go-to source for inbound links. Inbound links can go to either your website or (more likely and easily) to your own blog. For this reason, PR strategies that take blogs and bloggers into account have become a critical component of communications—and SEO—strategies for companies for which prominence on the Web is critical. Blogs support virtually all forms of media in addition to creating a reasonably steady stream of news and information that will attract, interest, and entice bloggers to mention and link to your own web properties. Readily available and frequently updated image, photo, video, and audio files can further build inbound links.
•Internal links: In addition to creating inbound links to a primary website or property, blogs can discuss topics, products, and services that are buried deep within the recesses of a commercial website. Creating deep links in optimized text can help raise visibility and awareness of long tail (see Truth 40, “Wag the long tail”) products, services, and concepts, while at the same time raising their potential search visibility. Blogs can also assist in making an overall domain more crawlable when they reside on that same domain (for example, www.blog.YourSite.com).
•RSS: RSS (discussed more deeply in the following truth) feeds syndicated content to search engines, as well as to other web properties. RSS feeds can help build traffic while at the same time boosting search engine visibility.
The more frequently content is updated, the more often search engines send crawlers around to take a look-see at the website.
•Frequent updates: The more frequently content is updated, the more often search engines send crawlers around to take a look-see at the website. Blog functionality has evolved, but blogs are still primarily considered “web logs” or journals that are frequently updated—often, much more frequently than a traditional website is updated. Blogs help get new and topical content out there: into search engines, RSS feeds, and other traffic-generating online channels.
•Keywords: A blog can be used as a valuable extension of an overall keyword strategy. Keywords and phrases should be applied to the blog’s name, meta tags, description, categories, and content.
•Structured content: Blog software platforms encourage the creation of categories so that content resides within hierarchical themes. By all means take advantage of this feature on your own blog, and carefully consider the categories and their naming structure. The clearer the categories, the easier it is for search engines to “understand” and contextualize the content, and thus to rank and display it appropriately in search results.
•Community: Blogs encourage participation and interaction not just through linking, but also through features such as comments and trackbacks. Encouraging participation on your own blog, as well as actively participating in others’ via posting comments, forum citations, and other types of contextually relevant linking, is a form of PR known as SEO PR. SEO PR works to boost blog visibility both within relevant communities as well as in search engine rankings.
